
Class r<JiW'^' 



CopightN? 



7 



COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



By Wm. Dudley Foulke 

MAYA: A Story of Yucatan. 

Second Edition, 12°. Illustrated. 

SLAV OR SAXON: A Study of the 
Growth and Tendencies of Russian 
Civilization. 

Second Edition y Revised, 12°. 

PROTEAN PAPERS. 12 . 



PROTEAN PAPERS 



BY 



WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE 

Author of " Maya," "Slav or Saxon," etc. 



^ 



G. P. PUTNAM^S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Zbc 1knlcKerbocf;et ipreea 
1903 



THE L iBRARY OF 
CONC^kESS. 

Two Copies Receivec 

OCT 16 1903 

Copyngnt Entry 

C^tA: i^^ I q ^ 3 
CUSS ^ XXc. No 

'1 C ^ f f 
COPY G. 










Copyright, 1903 






BY 






G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 


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Ubc ftnfcfterbocftcc press, 'Wcw l?orft 



PREFACE 

AT a Continental hotel, upon a laundry 
list prepared specially for English and 
American guests, there is found, after the 
usual catalogue of shirts, collars, cuffs, 
handkerchiefs, etc., a peculiar generic name, 
*' Variosshapes/' Having made certain 
modest efforts in history, biography, and 
fiction, I come now before the public with 
my '* Variosshapes," which are as miscel- 
laneous in outline and substance as the 
forms of old Proteus himself. 




Ill 



CONTENTS 



ON SPELLBINDERS .... 

ON THE ECONOMICAL ACQUISITION OF 

ROYAL ANCESTRY 
MY DOG 

ON MEXICAN MOUNTAINS 
SOME OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING GOETHE 
ON THE FRAILTIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 
A BROAD VIEW OF THE DISADVANTAGES 

OF A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION . 
A BASEBALL ROMANCE 
A VISIT TO YUCATAN . 
ON WILLIAM PENN AND HIS MISSION. 
AN EXPERT IN SCALPING 



PAGB 
I 



31 
47 

92 
98 

117 

134 
142 

170 

189 






PROTEAN PAPERS 



ON SPELLBINDERS 

A LOCAL authority on spellbinding 
once gave me the following pre- 
scription : '' Fill yourself with your subject, 
knock out the bung, and let nature caper." 
Even according to this recipe it is neces- 
sary to fill yourself with your subject, and 
no man is of much use in a political cam- 
paign who has not made a careful study of 
the issues. 

But men do this in different ways. One 
will prepare a speech and commit it ver- 
batim. Another will read all he can lay his 
hands on, classify and arrange his thoughts, 
and then trust to the occasion for his lan- 
guage. Another will prepare two or three 
addresses, or at least the materials for them, 



2 Protean Papers 

and then select, at the last moment, the one 
which he thinks best adapted to the audi- 
ence and the circumstances. 

The spellbinder, talking as he does day 
after day, is sure to find out by experience 
the things that are most effective in what 
he says. He soon leaves out the poorer 
parts of his speeches, adds something new 
to the rest, and before the end of the cam- 
paign there is developed, by a natural and 
experimental evolution, a far better argu- 
Xment than the one with which he began it. 

The man who goes out with a single 
address is sometimes caught in an awk- 
ward predicament. It is depressing to find 
among your auditors a large delegation 
from Smithville, where you delivered that 
magnificent peroration just two nights 
before. Even the same line of argument is 
apt to weary those who have once heard 
it. The ''Compleat Angler" who expects 
to catch many kinds of fish will not go 
out with a single kind of bait, and the 
''Compleat Spellbinder'* ought to have an 
assortment of speeches. Sometimes the 
daily press will report what you say in full, 
and it is embarrassing to come before your 
auditors prepared only to repeat what they 



On Spellbinders 3 

have just read in the newspaper. I remem- 
ber once being nearly caught in that pre- 
dicament in Chicago, through the error of 
a reporter to whom a copy of my remarks 
had been given in advance, for, as I came 
upon the. stage of the Central Music Hall 
one evening, I found myself congratulated 
upon an address which I was supposed to 
have delivered that afternoon, and which 
filled some two or three columns of the 
evening paper. Luckily I had other mate- 
rial on hand, and could substitute. 

The only safe plan for the spellbinder is 
to have speeches enough to *'go round.'* 
But if the newspapers print all you say, 
you are sometimes hard put to it to furnish 
new matter. Once when I was campaign- 
ing in Massachusetts, one of the Boston 
papers asked me each day to dictate *' copy " 
to a reporter, which the editor afterwards 
interspersed with presumptive ''applause," 
''laughter," "great enthusiasm," etc., in 
advance of delivery. This went on very 
well until Friday, when I found myself 
pumped dry, and on Saturday I was com- 
pelled, for lack of new matter, to condense 
the previous speeches of the week into 
one. 



4 Protean Papers 

It seems to me marvellous how men like 
Mr. Bryan, whose speeches are reported by 
the score and the hundred, can hold out as 
long as they do. But, in fact, after the first 
week or two there is little change. They 
avail themselves of new occurrences, local 
allusions, etc., but the substance of their 
addresses is much the same. 

For the purpose of furnishing materials 
for spellbinders, each of the parties pre- 
pares a ''Campaign Text-Book." This 
work is generally done by specialists, a 
particular subject being given to the man 
who is supposed to know the most about 
it. These books are hastily compiled, 
however, and are not by any means the 
best sources from which the spellbinder 
may collect his materials. They are often 
inaccurate and always violently partisan, 
generally concealing the opposing facts and 
arguments, so that the man who relies 
upon them may easily be caught napping 
by an antagonist who understands the other 
side of the question, which these ''text- 
books " fail to disclose. 

The joint debate is perhaps the best 
method of political discussion. In this the 
"campaign lie'* has to be eliminated. 



On Spellbinders 5 

Such a debate requires more careful prepa- 
ration than a regular speech, yet even here 
there is a great deal that depends upon acci- 
xdent and the humor of the audience. I 
remember once debating with a Green- 
backer in a little country town. He had 
sent me a challenge, and when it came to 
dividing the time, I told him I would make 
the division and he might say which of the 
two sections he would prefer. One of us 
was to speak half an hour, the other was to 
have an hour to reply, and the man who 
spoke first was to close in fifteen minutes. 
My opponent preferred to take the hour. 
The speeches were made from the porch 
of a country store. There was a large 
number of improvised benches, where the 
people sat, and behind these was a circle of 
carriages. It was quite dark, there being 
no light except immediately around the 
speakers, so that the carriages in the rear 
were scarcely visible. 1 spoke for my half 
hour, and then my adversary, an intelli- 
gent farmer, made a very good argument, 
carefully prepared, which needed an an- 
swer. I had only fifteen minutes in which 
to reply. I talked as rapidly as possible, an- 
swering his propositions one after another 



6 Protean Papers 

in quick succession. Suddenly a voice 
came from one of the carriages in the rear 
of the crowd asking a question. I replied 
quickly, and went on. Then followed 
another question and another, until the 
object seemed to be to cut short my 
time. Fortunately there came to my res- 
cue a farmer boy, who rose in the midst 
of the audience. He was a freckled, red- 
headed lad, in shirt sleeves, with one sus- 
pender holding up his trousers. He pointed 
back into the darkness whence the voice 
proceeded, and solemnly asked, ''Who the 
devil are you, anyway ? " and a voice re- 
plied, **I am the Hon. Charles Jenkins of 
Ohio.'' ''Well, why the devil don't you 
go back to Ohio.^" A shout went up 
from the throng and all further interruption 
ceased. 

Men who interrupt the speaker are not 
often wise. The man on the platform has a 
great advantage, for he has the last word 
and a sympathetic audience, so that even a 
poor retort uttered with a triumphant air is 
sure to carry the day. 

Not long ago when I happened to men- 
tion the name of Mr. Bryan, a big fellow 
rose in the midst of the audience, flung his 



On Spellbinders 7 

arms aloft, and shouted, '*' He 's a good 
man," and there was applause from some 
Democratic benches. I said to him, '' Sup- 
pose you tell me, my friend, one good 
thing he ever did in public life," and I paused 
for a reply. Now I was taking some 
chances in this challenge. Perhaps the 
man really knew of something valuable in 
Mr. Bryan's career, something I had not 
heard of. In that case he could have turned 
the tables on me. But he could not think 
of anything, so, after a dead silence, there 
came another burst of applause, and this 
time it was for me, as my interlocutor 
slipped to the door amid the jeers of the 
bystanders. 

Encouraged by this success, at my next 
meeting I asked the entire audience the 
same question, and the answer came, *'He 
prophesied," which gave an opportunity 
for salutary elaboration. 

On another occasion the answer was, 
**He broke up the Democratic party," 
which gave room for a profitable distinc- 
tion between voluntary and involuntary 
beneficence. 

Thus it is that the spellbinder can often 
score a point if he encourages interruptions, 



8 Protean Papers 

for a running debate is far more effective 
than a continuous speech. Sometimes, 
however, the interruptions are so incohe- 
rent as to be disastrous. Once while ad- 
dressing an out-of-door meeting, after 
obtaining some trifling advantage over an 
interlocutor, I called for further criticism, 
when a little old man, with a long chin 
beard, emitted from the outskirts of the 
crowd some inarticulate noises which 
sounded to me like '' Wah-hoo-wah-hee- 
bah! " I put my hand to my ear, assumed 
''a pleasant expression,'* and said, *M did 
not quite understand my friend." Again 
the noises were repeated, only a little 
louder. The man had evidently some im- 
pediment in his speech. 1 believe it is a 
well understood principle that, where one 
is speaking in an unknown tongue, the 
way to become perfectly clear is to utter 
exactly the same sounds with greater vo- 
ciferation and redoubled energy. Again I 
repeated my inquiry, and this time he 
screamed at the top of his voice, *' Wah- 
hoo-wah-hee-bah! " 

Generally the wrath of the audience pur- 
sues the man guilty of the interruption, but 
this time it was very justly directed against 



On Spellbinders 9 

myself, for a big fellow in front, who had 
heard enough of this sort of joint discus- 
sion, cried out in disgust, *'0h, go on, 
we Ve got to go to bed some time." 

Once, while political feeling was very 
bitter, I was speaking in the opera house 
of one of the cities of the Northwest, when 
a man in one of the front seats arose and 
commenced asking questions. I answered 
them apparently to the satisfaction of the 
audience, who cheered lustily at every re- 
tort. But this only spurred him on to 
renewed efforts, until finally a cry, *'Put 
him out!" arose from many parts of the 
house. It seemed to me that the colloquy 
was profitable, and I asked the audience to 
let him alone. But the chairman of the 
meeting was seized with great indignation, 
and, rushing to the footlights, shook his 
fist at the interlocutor, swore at him, and 
ordered him to get out. The man at last 
said he was going, but asked first to shake 
hands with the speaker. I invited him to 
come forward and do so, not without ap- 
prehensions that he would '*yank" me 
over the footlights, and the handshaking 
on my part was very brief While it was 
going on a policeman stole up behind him. 



lo Protean Papers 

seized him by the collar, and his departure 
was more sudden than he intended. 

Campaign oratory, being largely extem- 
poraneous, varies greatly in excellence, 
according to the mood of the speaker and 
the temper of the audience. In one place 
there will be an enthusiastic multitude to 
greet every effective point with ringing 
salvos of applause; at the next place there 
will be silence; in a third there will be 
general inattention and disorder, and per- 
haps the spellbinder will find his audience 
beginning to disperse within a few minutes 
after he commences his speech. A politi- 
cal audience is not to be held together like 
the congregation of a church or an as- 
semblage that has paid its money for a 
lecture. A man who attends a campaign 
meeting will not hesitate to leave when he 
has heard enough. I think we campaign- 
ers generally attribute an exodus from the 
hall while we are talking either to the hot 
night or to the trains which are just about 
to depart, or else to a conspiracy set on foot 
by the opposite party. But there are times 
when we cannot flatter ourselves with these 
illusions. 

I remember making an address in my 



On Spellbinders n 

own State, illustrated (as I thought) by a 
few apposite quotations. The audience 
listened attentively and appreciatively for 
more than two hours. I made substantially 
the same speech a few days later in a little 
country town in Maine, but I noticed that 
my hearers were restless and a number left 
the hall. Next morning, while sitting on 
the porch of the village inn, I overheard two 
countrymen who met in the dusty square 
in front. 

''Was you to the meetin' last night, 
neighbor Jenkins.^" asked one of the other. 

'' Yaas,'' was the answer. 

''Did ye hear the speakin' ?" 

"Yaas." 

"How was it.?" 

"Oh, 't wa* n't no account. T was 
mostly quotashunns.'' 

"Dotell!'* 

Evidently the demand in that place was 
for original thought. 

Opinions of a speech will differ widely 
among those who hear it. After a rather 
earnest argument at a meeting in a country 
town one of my auditors came up and 
clasped me by both my hands, crying 
enthusiastically, "That was a slick one !" 



12 Protean Papers 

Just outside the door two others were talk- 
ing together as I passed. ''What did you 
think of it?'' said one. ''I call it a bum 
speech/' said the other. Now, whatever 
be the precise meaning of "slick" and 
''bum/' no latitude of definition will ever 
make them synonymous. So I passed on, 
consoling myself that the last man must 
have been a wicked Democrat. 
- There is a great difference in audiences 
as to applause. Generally they are more 
demonstrative in the cities than in the coun- 
try districts, and I think perhaps a Chicago 
audience is more responsive than that of 
any other city in the North. In some of 
the rural neighborhoods of New England 
they call a political speech a "lecture," and 
seem to think they ought to treat it with 
the same solemnity as a sermon. 

At a meeting in the pretty opera house 
of a quiet Maine town the hall was filled 
with a gathering of grave and substantial 
citizens. The committeemen and local 
party leaders arranged themselves in a semi- 
circle across the stage, much like the per- 
formers in a minstrel show, and every hit 
made by the speaker was greeted with a 
methodical clapping of hands from the ' ' thin 



On Spellbinders 13 

black line " behind him, but with absolute 
silence in front; yet the gravity of no one, 
either on the stage or on the floor, was 
disturbed in the least by the unilateral char- 
acter of the applause thus solemnly ad- 
ministered. 

/ Some audiences are much slower in '' see- 
ing the point" than others, and again, there 
is a great difference between different 
groups even in the same audience. I have 
often seen a ripple of applause or laughter 
break out repeatedly in one particular spot, 
and then it would seem to diffuse itself in 
circling waves until it reached the extreme 
verge of the crowd. 

There are two kinds of applause which 
appear to me very different in character. 
One is that which gives an appropriate 
greeting to some apt sentiment, or to the 
conclusion of an argument, and the other is 
that which follows the mere utterance of a 
popular name, generally the name of some 
candidate. The latter kind is not specially 
complimentary to the speaker. 

Indeed, noisy demonstration is very 

rarely a proof of the excellence of a 

V speech. I remember once hearing a fine 

argument by Senator Sherman? which was 



14 Protean Papers 

received in silence, and was followed by a 
speech by ''Jim " Sullivan, the Irish orator, 
who rehearsed his story of the Republican 
pup that had its eyes open and the Demo- 
cratic pup that had its eyes closed, with 
other narratives of like character, which 
were greeted with rapturous applause ; and 
I then and there resolved to eschew all 
efforts to awaken that sort of enthusiasm. 
The close attention of an audience ought 
to be as gratifying as the clapping of 
hands, the stamping of feet, and shouts 
from ''the boys" interjected at inopportune 
places. 

The point of a story is often the signal 
for an outburst, and no one can deny the 
power of apposite illustration. The para- 
bles of the Bible and the stories of Lincoln 
had in them a pith and a point which could 
not be as well made in any other way. 
But many speakers are tempted, not to 
make the story the illustration of the speech, 
but to make the speech a mere pot-pourri 
of stories. The man who does this may 
be amusing, but in the long run he will not 
be taken seriously, and if he be unfamiliar 
with his audience he is likely to tread on 
^ somebody's toes without intending it. 



On Spellbinders 15 

In the campaign where James D. Williams 
and Benjamin Harrison were opposing can- 
didates for the governorship of Indiana, we 
Republicans used to make great fun of 
''Blue Jeans," as we called him, ridiculing 
his rustic manners and his homespun 
ways. We did n't make much by it, for 
the people of Indiana were mostly farmers, 
and after he had been elected and had made 
an honest, respectable, and sensible gover- 
nor, our campaign jokes looked rather piti- 
ful in retrospect. One night I spoke at a 
small neighborhood meeting, and repeated 
to my audience the following story which 
was going the rounds: 

Mr. Williams, who was then a member 
of Congress, was washing his hands at one 
of the lavatories in the Capitol, when an 
attendant handed him three towels. He 
sighed at such wanton extravagance and 
exclaimed: ''Why, down at my farm we 
make a single towel last the family a 
week!" 

This was a pretty poor story, but for all 
that I was astonished to see that there was 
not a smile upon any of the faces before 
me; indeed, their countenances took on 
even a deeper gloom. On my way home, 



1 6 Protean Papers 

as we drove through the woods, my com- 
panion said to me: 

''You did n't make any great hit with 
your story about Blue Jeans's towel/' 

''No, I did n't seem to." 

" Do you know why ?'* 

"No." 

"Well, I '11 tell you. There was n't a 
farmer in that crowd that had n't done the 
same thing himself ! " 

Even the story-teller, however, is far 
more effective than the solemn and oracu- 
lar wiseacre who, in slow and sepulchral 
tones, utters commonplaces as impres- 
sively as if they were the emanations of 
divine wisdom. This style of oratory is 
only endurable when it comes from a Sena- 
tor or a member of the Cabinet. 

Then there is the man who begins with 
a long introduction and spends half his 
time before he reaches the first point, 
working very hard to little purpose, like a 
leaky bellows. Then there is the man who 
denounces everybody and thus solidifies 
the ranks of the enemy until he is called 
off from his unprofitable tour by the 
managing committee. 

I used to go stumping with the distin- 



On Spellbinders 17 

guished Colonel B , who would talk of 

''scoundrels and murderers/' and connect 
them in some inscrutable way with ''the 
rotten old Democratic party." When I 
would tell him that was not the way to 
win Democratic votes, he would rejoin, 
" But it is the rotten old Democratic party.'* 
His maxim evidently was, "Let the truth 
be spoken though the heavens fall." Once 
a committee called upon me to protest 
against the Colonel's violent epithets. I 
told them they had better call on the 
Colonel; that I had already remonstrated, 
but that he had rejoined, "It rouses the 
people! " 

Denunciation is always dangerous unless 

it be during the last days of a campaign, 

when party lines are tightly drawn, and 

the sole purpose of the managers is to keep 

v^their men within the ranks. 

There is a great difference among spell- 
binders in dramatic power. Many years 
ago I had occasion to serve as chairman of 
a committee which investigated certain 
serious abuses in the benevolent institu- 
tions of my State, notably in the insane 
hospital. The condition of affairs was very 
grave. There was evidence of extensive 



1 8 Protean Papers 

corruption in the contracts for supplies, 
unwholesome food was furnished to the pa- 
tients at extravagant prices, and they suf- 
fered greatly from the neglect and cruelty 
of their attendants, who were appointed 
for political services under the spoils sys- 
tem then prevailing. We exposed these 
iniquities in considerable detail, and the 
issue became an important one in the next 
campaign. I was speaking in the court- 
house of one of our county towns with a 
young man who has since become a United 
States Senator. I spoke first and related 
the abuses we had discovered, making, as 
it seemed to me, a pretty strong case. I 
had perhaps a better personal knowledge 
of the facts than any one outside the insti- 
tutions we investigated. 

After I closed, my companion rose. He 
walked backwards and forwards along the 
small open space reserved for the members 
of the bar, and drew a burning picture of 
the horrors inflicted upon the helpless vic- 
tims of madness. You could smell the 
tainted meat and see the maggots in the 
butter on the tables of the asylum; you 
could hear the blows of the brutal at- 
tendants upon the backs of the patients; 



On Spellbinders 19 

you could listen to their screams as the 
scalding water poured upon them in the 
bath-tubs where they had been left by their 
drunken caretakers. So vivid was the 
scene that the audience in the court-room 
became hysterical with sympathy and in- 
dignation. To tell the truth, I never my- 
self realized the enormity of the outrages 
which 1 had taken so considerable a part in 
revealing until I heard them described by 
the eloquent young orator who knew noth- 
ing at all about them. 

The conduct of a speaker is often the 
subject of ingenious comment and conjec- 
ture. I once overheard two of my auditors 
discussing the question of my religious be- 
lief. '' He is a Methodist/' said one. '*No, 
he's a Quaker," answered the other. ''I 
tell you he's a Methodist," insisted the 
first. ** Did n't you see the way he walked 
around.?^" 

The similes and metaphors of the spell- 
binder who relies upon extemporaneous 
inspiration are often inappropriate and 
sometimes sadly mixed. A Hoosier orator, 
in delineating the noble character of Gen- 
eral Hancock, announced that ''his honor 
was as stainless as the sword that hung by 



20 Protean Papers 

his side at the battle of Gettysburg!" I 
was speaking once with a gentleman of 
broad culture and national reputation, who, 
in describing the energy put into a Presi- 
dential campaign, said that it was ''vast 
enough to stop and dam Niagara till that 
great cataract should become a windmill 
made of paper!" This declaration was 
made with such impressive solemnity that 
no one in the audience perceived any ex- 
aggeration or lack of propriety in it, and 
yet upon reflection the transmutation of 
forces involved in making a paper windmill 
out of Niagara by public speeches is some- 
thing which transcends not merely a scien- 
tific but even a poetic imagination. My 
friend was talking from a platform raised 
sixteen or eighteen feet above the ground, 
which may account for the loftiness of the 
conception. 

Many speakers talk over the heads of 
their auditors. Their long words and com- 
plex sentences fail to reach the men who 
hear them. Even physical altitude some- 
\ times has a disastrous effect. I once went 
out with a companion to a country town. 
He spoke from the porch of a grocery 
store at some little elevation from the street. 



On Spellbinders 21 

The audience was inattentive and restless. 
I determined to get nearer to them, so I got 
down into the street and harangued them 
with much better success. A few days 
afterwards we had a meeting in a church. 
I spoke from the pulpit and found very 
poor listeners. My companion profited by 
the lesson of the preceding night and walked 
up and down the aisle. He made a great 
hit of it. 

^ Much depends upon the acoustic proper- 
ties of the hall. In some places, like the 
Chicago Auditorium, a speaker can be heard 
in every part of the building with scarcely 
any labor; in other places, sometimes even 
in small rooms, a great deal of unnecessary 
energy has to be wasted in the mere effort 
to be intelligible. Out-of-door meetings 
are usually the worst of all. As a rule, a 
speaker can do better work in a hall which 
will hold a thousand persons than he can 
in talking to five thousand in the open air. 
The confusion in out-of-door meetings is 

\ very distracting. 

I was much surprised, during the last 
Presidential campaign, at the excellence 
of the music at some of the meetings, par- 
ticularly from the local bands. I think it 



22 Protean Papers 

would astonish our friends from the East, 
who are prone to believe that the Missis- 
sippi valley is quite devoid of all apprecia- 
tion of true art, to hear the music of some 
of these country bands. The difficulty with 
them is that they seem to believe (judging 
from the length of their performances in 
the hall, as well as from the concerts they 
give just outside the door while the spell- 
binder is vainly endeavoring to make him- 
self heard inside) that they are the principal 
attraction, a thing which may be true, but 
which we spellbinders resent, believing 
that we ought ourselves to be the main 
feature of a political meeting. 

But a band is only one of the distractions 
against which we have to contend. A 
drum corps is even a more formidable com- 
petitor, while railway whistles, toot horns, 
cannon, and indiscriminate yells for different 
candidates form a far less agreeable diver- 
sion. To speak against such opposition 
requires nerve, composure, and lung power, 
if not ability. 

It seems to be a well-accepted axiom that 
noise is the most important part of a cam- 
paign; not only more vital than argument, 
but more convincing even than uniforms, 



On Spellbinders 23 

illumination, or fireworks. Witness the 
exhortation of a disgusted committeeman 
to a silent torch-bearer — ''Yell! or drop 
-\ yer torch! '* 

Sometimes noise is all that is really ex- 
pected even from a speaker. When I 

helped Governor H open the campaign 

down at Mt. Vernon the chairman said to 
me: '' Lord, they don't want no argyment! 
Just whoop her up! " 

The campaign speaker never knows what 
is in store for him. He may arrive at the 
station and find a brass band, a procession 
with a Goddess of Liberty on a ''float," and 
a carriage draped with American flags and 
ornamented with pictures of the candidates, 
or he may be obliged to walk through the 
streets alone and have some trouble in hunt- 
ing up the committeeman. He may find 
that his fame has preceded him, or he may 
discover from the spelling on the posters 
that the local managers do not know his 
name. 

Perhaps the worst example of indiffer- 
ence on record was that related by General 

M , a distinguished old campaigner of 

my own State. When he came to the sta- 
tion at the place where he was to speak, 



24 Protean Papers 

he said that at first he could not even find 
the town. It was growing dark ; there was 
nothing in sight and no lights were visible. 
At last he followed a fellow-passenger along 
a footpath across a wide common, and fi- 
nally came upon some houses. It was just 
the hour of the meeting, so he had to go 
v/ithout his supper. He found the hall by 
following a few straggling villagers who 
climbed an outside stairway to a room 
above a store. Nobody was in charge of 
the gathering, but after inquiry he learned 
that a person of his name was expected to 
address the meeting, so he introduced him- 
self and made his speech. 

The spellbinder must not be too par- 
ticular about his accommodations. He must 
go to the hotel where the committee sends 
him,, for if a Republican speaker betakes 
himself to the Democratic tavern or a Dem- 
ocratic orator becomes a guest at the Re- 
publican inn, the party may long be rent by 
grievous local dissensions. Often the spell- 
binder who can neither see things nor smell 
things is the happiest. I was awakened 
one morning on my last campaigning tour 
by the strident voices of two females in an 
adjoining room. There had been a protest 



On Spellbinders 25 

of some kind from one of them, to which 
the other screamed the crushing rejoinder, 
'*Well, if the floor's too dirty for ye to 
dress on, can't you git up on a cheer?" 
The conversation was justified by the sur- 
roundings. 

At many places the campaigner may get 
into trouble if he does not understand the 
local arrangements. Several years ago I 

was campaigning with Colonel X in 

Orange County, a rough, hilly neighbor- 
hood, in which at that time there were 
no railroads. We were to speak in the 
court-house at Paoli, the county-seat. 
There was a clean little country tavern in 
the town. You entered a wide hall, at 
the end of which there was a small wash- 
room with a wooden sink and a tin basin, 
and just above was a cask with a spigot, 
which presumably held the water for wash- 
ing. The colonel was always particular 
about his personal appearance. He had 
in former years held a position of some 
importance in the foreign service of the 
Government, and as he was the older man 
I always yielded him precedence, a cour- 
tesy which he seemed to appreciate. So 
his turn at that wash-basin came first. He 



26 Protean Papers 

took off his coat with considerable delib- 
eration, rolled up his shirt sleeves, turned 
on the spigot, and filled the basin, but 
no sooner did I hear the swish of the liquid 
on his face and hands than he leaped back, 
stamped furiously upon the floor, and 
swore as I never heard man swear before. 
''What is the matter?" I asked. ''Oh, 
damn it! It's coal oil!'' was the des- 
pairing answer. I maintained a respectful 
distance from the colonel during the next 
few days. 

The spellbinder sees more "local color" 
in his peregrinations than any other kind 
of traveller. He must shake hands with 
everybody, and generally he is introduced 
to a crank or to some Greenbacker or 
"universal peace man" with belligerent 
tendencies, or more commonly some un- 
compromising Prohibitionist, with whom 
he is expected to "square things" in be- 
half of the party, and the arguing that goes 
on in the midst of a knot of bystanders 
would furnish entertainment to Bedlam. 

The spellbinder has to concede a great 
deal to local prejudices. 1 once drove to 
a village in the northern part of my own 
county, and just before I reached it I was 



On Spellbinders 27 

met by the local manager. ''Good God! 
you 're not going to drive into Smalltown 
with your own carriage and coachman?'' 
I had no denial to interpose, for the evi- 
dence against me was at hand. So I fee- 
bly asked: ''Why not?" He answered: 
" Why, you could n't undo the damage 
in ten speeches ! Hitch the horses here 
in the woods, and if your driver wants to 
go to the meeting let him come in from 
the other side of the town!" All which 
was done in concession to local sensi- 
bilities. 

There is a great deal of wear and tear in 
a campaign. You are often up all night; 
you talk till your clothes are wringing 
wet, and then drive a dozen miles across 
the country. You have to put up with 
all sorts of fare; you run the risk of ma- 
laria. There are some who break down 
under the strain and have to cancel their 
engagements. And yet, except for our 
throats, I believe the majority of us come 
out of a campaign in better condition 
than we enter it, especially if we have 
no personal care or anxiety concerning 
the canvass. Really there are few better 
kinds of exercise than public speaking. It 



28 Protean Papers 

expands the lungs, develops the muscles 
of the arms and legs, and keeps the brain 
active at the same time. What other kind 
of athletics can furnish all these desiderata ? 
If you can preserve your good-nature, 
keep your appetite, and make up in the 
morning the sleep you lose at night, 
there is no reason why a campaign should 
not make you stronger and healthier than 
ever. 

The spellbinder (especially if his services 
are gratuitous) will be received in the com- 
mittee rooms of his party with exuberant 
hospitality, testified to by a slap on the 
back, and an invitation to ' make himself 
perfectly at home, as much as in his own 
house.' There are perhaps a score of peo- 
ple in two or three small rooms, containing 
only half a dozen chairs, and everybody 
hard at work, so the invitation, although cor- 
dial, does not always assure the spellbinder 
of comfortable accommodation. But the 
chairman of the speakers' bureau will tell 
him of the wonderful effect produced at 
the meeting at Jonesboro by his eloquent 
words. He will assure him that since he is 
one of the most distinguished orators in the 
nation, the party must have his services for 



On Spellbinders 29 

the entire campaign. When he has suc- 
cumbed to these blandishments and feels 
that, like Gil Bias, he is the eighth wonder 
of the world, he is sent to Pinhook, a place 
which he can find neither in the Postal nor 
the Railway Guide, to talk to a score of 
farmers who never heard of him until they 
were informed by the same party manager 
that he is one of the greatest statesmen and 
most magnificent orators in the country. 
Titles are added to his name which he 
never possessed before. I have been an- 
nounced as Colonel, Judge, Member of 
Congress, Member of the Paris Peace Com- 
mission, of the Venezuela Commission, etc., 
until these titles, by reason of long usage, 
now repose gracefully upon my brow. 
Perhaps the most remarkable claim to pub- 
lic consideration was that which I found 
awaiting me when I arrived at an Illinois 
town and saw myself advertised, in large 
posters, as a statistician of national reputa-^ 
tion, and the people were urged to ''Turn 
Out and Hear the Great Statistician! " Sta- 
tistics give me the nightmare, and I should 
have thought that this would have been 
enough to keep everybody from going to 
the hall. But after supper a large band 



30 Protean Papers 

came up to the door of the hotel and I was 
invited to follow it. There were perhaps 
forty persons in the band, and the pro- 
cession behind it seemed rather small for 
such a cortege, since it consisted of only 
three persons, the Eminent Statistician in 
the middle, flanked by the county commit- 
teeman on one side and the district com- 
mitteeman on the other. In solemn state 
we marched around the public square and 
entered the hall, which I was surprised to 
find comfortably filled. The people of that 
town evidently had no horror of statistics. 

Still more surprising, however, was the 
attitude of the inhabitants of a prosperous 
manufacturing town in the State of Maine. 
At this place I spoke with a United States 
Senator, and was astonished to notice the 
intense interest which the audience gave to 
the figures by means of which he deduced 
the national and local prosperity resulting 
from the tariff. There was a convincing 
power in his 567,698,475 dollars and 69 
cents, particularly in the cents, which no other 
form of argument or rhetoric could appa- 
rently have supplied. I followed the Sena- 
tor with some remarks upon other subjects 
which I thought ought to be interesting. 



/ 



On Spellbinders 31 

but I observed that my hearers became rest- 
less and some of them left the hall. Seeing 
how well the Senator had done with his 
statistics, I tried a few figures myself, and 
was surprised to notice that so long as they 
held out the patience of my audience held 
out too, but that when my figures failed 
the endurance of my audience gave way, so 
that I had to bring my speech to a hasty 
conclusion. Should this eagerness for sta- 
tistics become general, a friend of mine 
suggests that actuaries and bookkeepers 
may soon furnish the most valuable aid to 
our speaking campaign and that the statis- 
tical spellbinder will finally supersede the 
Demostheneses and Ciceros of the past and 
the present. 

A new convert is very valuable as a cam- 
paign speaker, but the excellence of his 
argument is quite a secondary matter when 
compared with his value for exhibition pur- 
poses as a recruit. He is especially in de- 
mand if it can be said of him that his 
father, his brother, or, better still, every 
member of his family belongs and has for 
generations belonged to the opposite party, 
as showing through what tremendous ob- 
stacles of blood and environment he has 



32 Protean Papers 

worked his way up from darkness into 
light. I have sometimes been surprised to 
find myself advertised as one who had thus 
forsaken the pathway of error, the attrac- 
tion on this account being perhaps even 
greater than the putative judgeship, sena- 
torship, or colonelcy with which my name 
N was also connected. 

In one district I visited, the managers had 
secured a gem of peculiar lustre, a young 
fellow whose father was then engaged 
in campaigning for the other side, and who 
was sent to follow his progenitor around 
the State and answer him at the same 
places a night or two afterwards, telling to 
enthusiastic audiences how the old man 
had beguiled him four years ago, but could 
never do it again. 

The blandishments offered by the politi- 
cal manager to the spellbinder must not be 
too severely censured, for the poor commit- 
teeman is between the devil and the deep 
sea. On the one hand are the many spell- 
binders, each insisting upon the best ap- 
pointments in the country — men to whom 
the Chicago Auditorium and the Metropoli- 
tan Opera House in New York seem the 
fittest places for the display of their capa- 



On Spellbinders 33 

bilities; and on the other hand there is an 
infinite number of local communities, each 
demanding the best speaker that the coun- 
try affords. Every village v^ants to hear 
Roosevelt, Bryan, Cockran, or Depew. 
What then is left for the poor manager to 
do except to exalt Smith or Jones to a na- 
tional rank, to proclaim that he is some- 
thing ''equally as good" as Beveridge or 
Dolliver or Hill, and on the other hand to 
exalt each cross-roads neighborhood to a 
place of vital importance in the campaign, 
almost as essential to party success as 
Chicago and New York, and to promise a 
vast audience from the surrounding coun- 
try ? Of course there is disappointment on 
both sides. The spellbinder foams at the 
mouth when he realizes that the man who 
flattered him is a deceiver, while the peo- 
ple at the cross-roads denounce the central 
committee for sending them a gas-bag in 
place of an orator. But what else can they 
do ? The most thankless place in a cam- 
paign is a place on the executive commit- 
tee, especially at the head of the speakers' 
bureau. 

We spellbinders are by nature a con- 
ceited tribe, and sometimes in our inter- 



34 Protean Papers 

course with each other many of us realize 
that celebrated definition of a bore — ''A 
man who insists upon talking about him- 
self when you want to talk about yourself/' 
I have found many spellbinders of this 
kind. They relate their forensic triumphs in 
terms that defy all competition. Some of 
them are even mathematical in describing 
their powers of persuasion. Who, for in- 
stance, could hope to excel the magnetic 
power of the orator who exultantly an- 
nounced in the rooms of the National Com- 
mittee that at Brownstown he had had 
** eleven applauses and three 'go ons ' " ? 

Conscious as he always is of his own 
excellence, the spellbinder is sure to meet 
many trials and disappointments. Perhaps 
his meeting has not been properly an- 
nounced, and he finds only a few straggling 
guests to partake of his teeming banquet of 
eloquence. That is hard enough, but even 
worse is it when there is a large gather- 
ing and another man speaks first at great 
length, leaving him nothing but the rem- 
nants both of the time and the audience. 
How tedious and dull was the speech of 
that first fellow, who thus deprives an 
unconscious rnultitude of something more 



On Spellbinders 35 

valuable and attractive ! Perhaps the hard- 
est trial to the spellbinder is to find, after 
he has been sent to a large city in which 
he supposes he is to be the central and sole 
attraction, that he is only one of a cargo 
of eloquence shipped at the same time to 
the same place for the same purpose. 

But, in spite of these drawbacks, I think 
most of us still consider campaigning good 
fun, and however welcome the home circle 
and a little rest after a month or two spent 
upon a stumping tour, I am sure that nearly 
all of us will be ready to try it again after 
four years. 

The concluding page of the spellbinder's 
duty remains to be written. After the 
campaign is over and the votes are cast, 
he still must ''ratify.'' If he is at head- 
quarters when the news of victory comes, 
this is a simple matter — one more speech 
with louder interruptions and greater en- 
thusiasm than ever, and his work is over. 
If he belongs to the defeated party, the 
thing is still simpler. He has only to crawl 
into his hole. But quite different is it with 
the spellbinder on the victorious side, if 
his confidence has been so great as to stifle 
his curiosity and he has presumed to go 



36 Protean Papers 

to bed before ascertaining the result. A 
distant but constantly increasing noise of 
horns and drums and cheers breaks in upon 
his slumbers ; next, word is brought that a 
crowd is seen coming up the drive. With 
shrieks and yells under his window they 
demand a speech. Then he goes forth 
upon the balcony, clad perchance in a huge 
overcoat, which supplies the lack of more 
appropriate apparel, and there, still half 
asleep, he talks incoherently and waves his 
hands. But whatever he says, it is enough. 
The pounding on the tin pans, the hur- 
rahs, the waving of the dead rooster from 
the pole, fill every hiatus, until the crowd 
departs and he tumbles into bed again, 
where ''The Fairies' Midwife " touches his 
silver tongue and he dreams of postmaster- 
ships, collectorships, and other fair forms 
of continuing and increasing prosperity 
such as are wont to follow the footsteps of 
successful eloquence. 

And before any grim awakening shall 
mar his visions, here let us leave him. 



ON THE ECONOMICAL ACQUISITION 
OF ROYAL ANCESTRY 

UP to within a recent period a royal, or 
even a noble, ancestry in this country 
has, in general, been the exclusive posses- 
sion of the families that have been best able 
to pay for it. For some inscrutable reason, 
a coat-of-arms and a large and recently 
acquired fortune have frequently gone to- 
gether. 

It has always seemed to me that there 
was an essential injustice in this partiality 
of genealogy to wealth, and that the harm- 
less delight of contemplating a magnificent 
ancestry ought to be, like other gifts of Na- 
ture, free to all, or at least accessible to 
those of modest purses. It is therefore a 
source of pride that I am an humble mem- 
ber of a family through whom this reform 
has actually been inaugurated. 

The Foulke family, composed of the 

37 



38 Protean Papers 

descendants of Edward Foulke, an early set- 
tler of Gwynedd, Montgomery County, Pa., 
held a reunion a few years since, at which 
about six hundred members, in good health 
and condition, met to celebrate the two- 
hundredth anniversary of the immigration 
of their common ancestor. 

The traditions of the family, as well as 
certain parish records and monumental in- 
scriptions, trace its origin to one Rhirid 
Flaidd, a Welsh chieftain of the time of 
Henry II., and we Foulkes regarded with 
quite sufficient complacency a line of an- 
cestors who, if not very eminent, were 
numerous, some of them quite ancient, and 
most of them entirely respectable. 

Philadelphia is the natural home of gene- 
alogy. To a Philadelphian an ample pedigree 
is better than great riches. Pennsylvania 
has a Genealogical Society whose members 
exhibit unwearied diligence in the study of 
heraldic literature. A family history like 
that of the Foulkes, when it reaches the ken 
of the Pennsylvania genealogist, falls upon 
rich ground ; upon soil as fertile for the re- 
production and multiplication of illustrious 
pedigrees as is the red clay of Cuba for the 
cultivation of the sugar-cane. The result 



Royal Ancestry 39 

of the reunion of the Foulke family was the 
preparation and exhibition of eight genea- 
logical tables showing the descent of Edward 
and Eleanor Foulke, compiled by one of the 
members of the Genealogical Society of 
Pennsylvania. These have now been re- 
produced in book form and purchased by 
various members of the family, to whose 
astonished eyes they reveal a luxuriant pro- 
digality of noble and royal ancestry which, 
it is safe to say, can rarely be matched in 
history. 

Table I. shows the descent from ancient 
British kings, beginning with Glouyw 
Glwad Lydan, King and founder of the 
city of Caer Louyw or Gloucester, thence 
through the great Vortigern elected King 
of Britain a.d. 425, who espoused Severa, 
daughter of Maximus Magnus, Roman Em- 
peror, beheaded a.d. 388; to Brochwel 
Ysgythrog, King of Powys (where under 
the sun is the kingdom of Powys .^) and 
Prince of Chester, slain in battle against 
the Saxons on the banks of the Dee, a.d. 
612; and to his descendant. Sir Griffith 
Vaughan, created Knight Benneret at the 
battle of Agincourt, whose daughter Anne 
married leven Vychan, of Llanuwchllyn, 



40 Protean Papers 

from whom Edward Foulke was eighth in 
descent, as shown in Table V. 

What heart is there that will not swell 
with pride when it learns for the first time 
that the blood of the Emperor Maximus 
Magnus flows through its ventricles ? What 
soul so dead that it will not stir with wrath 
on reading in the Epistle of Gildas, an early 
Anglo-Saxon chronicler, certain unjust as- 
persions upon the character of this imperial 
ancestor ? 

Shade of the mighty though decapitated 
Maximus! Whether thy head hang upon 
some Elysian bough or float on Phlege- 
thonian flames, let it console thee to know 
that we, thy remote posterity, the distant 
scions of the ''Greatest Great," are ready 
to wage implacable vendetta against the 
Saxon churl who has defamed thee! 

In these days when new societies are 
being organized every year to illustrate the 
greatness of the progenitors of those who 
compose them, it would seem fair that 
competition in ancestry should have the 
widest possible development. The ''Daugh- 
ters of the Revolution " must give way to 
the " Colonial Dames " that antedate them. 
The "Colonial Dames" must always take 



Royal Ancestry 41 

a subordinate place by the side of the 
* 'American Queens/' or *' Order of the 
Crown," composed of the descendants of 
royal houses. Why should not these in 
turn yield the palm to an order, *' De- 
scendants of the Roman Emperors '' ? Such 
a fraternity ought no longer to delay its 
appearance. 

Table II. of the Foulke genealogy 'Ms 
devoted to the descent from Bleddyn ab 
Cynfyn to Gruffudd Vychan, Baron of 
Glyndffrdwy, whose wife was Eleanor, 
daughter of Thomas ab Llewellyn, a lineal 
descendant of Edward I., King of England, 
as shown in Table VII." 

The genealogist evidently does not in- 
tend to let King Edward get away from 
the family, and an additional safety attach- 
ment is provided in Tables III. and IV., 
which ''trace the descent from Roderick 
the Great (Roderig Mawr), King of all 
Wales in 843, to Llewellyn ab Owain, who 
married Eleanor de Barr, granddaughter of 
Edward I." 

But the gem of the collection is Table 
VII., which "shows the descent of Ed- 
ward Foulke from the Saxon, Norman, Ger- 
man, Castilian, and Scottish royal houses 



42 Protean Papers 

of the eleventh century, through the mar- 
riage of Eleanor, daughter of Thomas ab 
Llewellyn, to Gruffydd Vychan, Baron of 
Glyndffrdwy." 

It will be seen from this that very little 
of the royalty of Europe has managed to 
escape from the ancestry of the family. It 
is to be regretted that the Grand Princes 
of Moscow, the Shahs of Persia, and the 
Emperors of China cannot as yet be clearly 
identified, but it is to be hoped that time 
and a still more exhaustive research by the 
Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania will 
at last supply the broken links which con- 
nect us with these dynasties. 

Even the best antiquarians, however, are 
sure to encounter unreasonable criticism. 
A friend writes me that a Pennsylvania 
genealogist has small cause to plume him- 
self on the results of his work if, having 
once reached a royal family, he can go no 
farther back than a Roman Emperor of the 
fourth century, since it is well known that 
the heralds who investigated the pedigrees 
of those royal families traced them without 
interruption to the Kings of Israel, to the 
patriarchs, to our good father Noah, and 
finally to our common parents in the Gar- 



Royal Ancestry 43 

den of Eden. He further tells me that 
these heralds described minutely the coats- 
of-arms of all these ancient worthies, though 
there is still doubt as to which of the de- 
vices attributed to Noah was the true one. 
Was it a dove volant, or a whole menagerie 
passant? My friend inclines to the latter 
opinion, and gives as his reason that many 
of the descendants of Noah having adopted 
various selections from this menagerie, there 
is no other evidence of their right to do 
this except the fact that all the animals 
in question were properly blazoned on the 
shield of their common ancestor at the time 
when they passed into the ark, and my friend 
rejects as totally inadmissible the suggestion 
made by some that Noah's device repre- 
sented Mount Ararat rampant, surmounted 
by an ark couchant, and encircled by a 
grapevine; for, as he justly observes, al- 
though such a device might be valuable 
historically, in perpetuam rei memoriam, it 
is neither heroic nor heraldic. 

I was at first inclined to agree with my 
friend, that our Pennsylvania genealogist 
was remiss in failing to graft the Foulke 
pedigree upon that of the royal families in 
question, thus connecting us at once with 



44 Protean Papers 

the ultimate source and root of all gene- 
alogy; and I felt this the more deeply when 
I compared the imperfect traditions of my 
own family with that of a Philadelphia lady 
whom I met at a summer watering-place, 
and who, speaking of her ancestors, said, 
with that quiet gravity which was the best 
guaranty of her good faith as well as her 
good breeding, '*We can trace every link 
in our chain of descent from Adam the son 
of God/' But then came the thought that 
after this supreme goal of genealogical art 
had once been reached, and it was proved 
beyond doubt that we were descended 
from Adam and his rib, in what would 
this give us any claim to superiority over 
the rest of mankind ? It is perhaps better 
that our family genealogist stopped at one 
of the intermediate stages. 

The Foulke pedigree has been subject to 
other irreverent observations by the un- 
informed, and in regard to the twenty-six 
coats-of-arms which **with their heraldic 
descriptions are distributed through the 
tables, all based upon authority,'' one skep- 
tic thinks it extraordinary that the Welsh 
tribesmen who had no coats to their backs 
should gleam forth in history as possessors 



Royal Ancestry 45 

of brilliant coats-of-arms. Such criticism 
is doubtless due to the critic's still more 
scanty knowledge of their actual apparel. 

One member of the family, using the 
answer of Artemus Ward to the matri- 
monial proposals of the Mormon widows, 
said that it was ''the muchness'' of these 
ancestors that he objected to; that he did 
not mind a duke or two, or even a king, 
but he did not want so many of them. 
Such moderation is manifestly impossible 
when intermarriages between royal families 
are considered. If you are willing to take 
one king for a progenitor you may have to 
take a hundred. In the matter of royal an- 
cestors, as well as of intoxicants, there is no 
perfect safety except in total abstinence. 

But the marvel, as well as the chief ad- 
vantage, of these tables is that they are 
offered at the low price of three dollars per 
copy. The man who will not give that 
trifling sum for such splendid progenitors 
must be insensible to the calls of fame and 
to all noble aspirations. 

It is to be hoped that the step thus taken 
toward the democratization of royal and 
noble blood will be generally followed, and, 
although few families can hope to vie in 



46 



Protean Papers 



ancestry with the variegated luxuriance of 
that of the family of Foulke, that all may 
in time find some sort of nobility, and even 
royalty, within easy reach, thanks to the 
diligence of the Genealogical Society of 
Pennsylvania. 




MY DOG 

I ALWAYS had bad luck with dogs. I 
bought a black and tan, he ran away; 
a Scotch terrier, he was stolen; a spotted 
coach dog, and I don't know what became 
of him. I have one now that I got when 
he was a puppy in order that the chil- 
dren might *' train him." They did so, 
and this dog is in great peril of assassi- 
nation. 

The only dog I had who was ''ever 
faithful " was Prince. Prince was not ex- 
actly my dog — that is, he was never for- 
mally transferred to me by any one, — but 
we went to Long Branch every summer, 
and a few days after our arrival Prince 
would come to visit us, and he always 
prolonged his visit until we left in the fall. 
I can not say exactly what kind of a dog 
Prince was; in fact, I do not recollect ever 
having seen any of the breed elsewhere, 

47 



4^ Protean Papers 

which leads me to think it must be rare. 
I will describe him, and those better in- 
formed can draw their conclusions. He 
was about two feet and a half long, with 
a big round body set about three inches 
above the ground upon four little fat 
legs. These legs had remarkable sinuosities 
which are hard to describe, but whether 
they were the result of a peculiarity in the 
stock, or of early misfortune in this partic- 
ular dog, I am not able to say. He had 
large flat feet, almost as big as the rest of 
his legs, and the toes of the front feet 
turned out so decidedly that the footprints 
would indicate the dog was going in two 
opposite directions at the same time. His 
prevailing color was yellow, interspersed 
with spots of brownish clay color and dirty 
white. He was further often adorned with 
splashes of mud. His hair was thick and 
shaggy, and hung over his eyes. If you 
stroked him (which you did not often do), 
you could feel the burrs under his long, 
coarse hair, and quantities of small shot 
beneath his skin — deposited there by the 
neighbors in vain efforts to shorten his 
existence. If any one should recognize the 
breed from this description, he will proba- 



My Dog 49 

bly know that there are two qualities for 
which dogs of this kind can be recom- 
mended. The first is their indestructibility, 
and the second, their adhesiveness to any 
one who will give them something to eat. 
Three several times was that dog thrown 
into a cistern, and three several times did 
Providence interpose by a miracle to save 
his life. Nothing short of supernatural 
assistance could account for his invulnera- 
bility to stones, bricks, tin pans, and every 
other conceivable missile hurled at him by 
an outraged public. 

Prince had a discriminating mind; he 
always knew just whom to bite. A party 
of young rascals could steal into our melon 
patch at night and empty it without the 
slightest risk, but a friend who came to 
visit us was always in danger, and did 
not often escape without damage to his 
raiment and his skin. Prince was the best 
known dog in the neighborhood; I think 
our family was chiefly distinguished in the 
place because we belonged to that dog. 
For some reason we were not popular, 
our characters being judged by the com- 
pany we kept. 

Prince was old when he first came to us, 



50 Protean Papers 

but he lived with us for ten summers and 
never seemed to grow any older. His 
best trait was his affection for ''Auntie," 
the one human being on earth who could 
tolerate him. Indeed, much of her time 
was passed in fruitless efforts to screen his 
character from the calumnies of an unjust 
world. Prince followed her everywhere, 
snapping at every one that passed, as the 
suspected enemy of his mistress; and she 
declared that he was at heart really one 
of the best dogs in the world, but much 
misunderstood. And when he kept us 
awake at night howling hyena-like in the 
front yard, she would patiently listen to 
the noise for hours, regarding it as only an- 
other evidence of his wonderful faithfulness. 

At last, however, even Prince went the 
way of all the earth. One summer we 
returned and he was no longer there to 
meet us. 

But my dog par excellence was Drapeau. 
There was no difficulty in telling what kind 
of a dog he was. He was a St. Bernard, 
bought from the monks at the Hospice. 

It was in the summer of 1872. 1 had 
been climbing, with a companion and a 
guide, across glaciers, around the Matter- 



My Dog 51 

horn, over the St. Theodule Pass, down 
to Breuil and Val Tournanche, in Italy. 
Thence we proceeded to Aosta, and back 
again to Switzerland by way of the St. 
Bernard. We had left the little village of 
St. Remy, on the Italian side, and night over- 
took us while we were in the midst of the 
clouds. We could not see an arm's length 
before us; we could only tell we were 
upon the path because it felt differently 
under our feet from the sharper rocks on 
either side. We could hear the roaring of 
water far down upon the left, and felt that 
we must be close to the brink of the preci- 
pice, with high cliffs on the other side. Our 
alpenstocks alone preserved us from the 
danger of pitching headlong into space. 
We groped on in the darkness for a long 
while, making very little headway. Our 
guide was a cheerful individual, who 
amused us with stories of travellers that 
had been waylaid and killed in the neigh- 
borhood a short time previous. In an hour 
or two we came to a little cantine, where 
we found some drunken Italians, and from 
them we borrowed a lantern, by which we 
could see the path perhaps two or three feet 
ahead. It was nearly midnight when we 



52 Protean Papers 

reached the Hospice. The first sign that 
we were near it was the barking of the 
great dogs, and never was sound more 
grateful to the ear. One of the brothers 
gave us a good supper, and assigned us 
clean, comfortable beds. I had long wanted 
a St. Bernard dog, a real one from the 
Hospice, one of the life-savers, whose pic- 
tures 1 had seen in childhood, licking the 
faces of travellers that had fallen uncon- 
scious in the snow. Next morning we 
rose early to start for Martigny, and the 
monk who had entertained us had the 
dogs brought out from their kennels that 
I might take my choice. They bounded 
about, eight big burly fellows, barking and 
capering like mad. I selected Drapeau, 
one of the largest. The monk gave me 
his history, telling me that the dog had 
taken part in saving several lives, and was 
regarded as a very valuable animal. The 
keeper of the dogs accompanied us to a 
cantine, three miles below, where we were 
to take a wagon. Drapeau followed us on 
the way down; he was an immense, tan- 
colored, short-haired animal, much like a 
lioness in appearance, capering about with 
all the delight of life and liberty in the cool 



My Dog 53 

morning air. His ankles were as thick as 
my two fists, and his neck and shoulders 
were enormous. 

Leaving the cantine, we lifted him into a 
wagon and I held on to his large leather 
collar to prevent him from getting away, 
but the moment we started and he saw 
that his master was not there, he leaped out 
and hung by the collar, struggling fiercely. 
It was easy to see that we could not carry 
him down in that fashion, so we hired his 
keeper to ride with us to Martigny. It 
would take the man two days to go and 
return, but there was no other way to 
transport the dog. 

When Drapeau saw his master in the 
wagon he became quiet. But as soon as 
we reached the valley the poor animal be- 
gan to suffer greatly. He was used to the 
cold mountain air, and the hot noonday 
sun in the lower altitude was too much for 
him. The motion of the wagon, too, 
made him horribly seasick, and we feared 
that we never should get him to Martigny 
alive. When we reached the inn the dog 
was so weak he could hardly drag one 
foot after another. He would neither eat 
nor drink, and he looked forlorn. 



54 Protean Papers 

Early in the afternoon the train started 
for Geneva. On the Continent there is a 
special place in all the trains for dogs, a 
small compartment in the luggage van, 
with a window at each side, and special 
'* dog-tickets" have to be purchased. We 
crowded Drapeau into one of these com- 
partments, fastened him in securely, and 
the train started. Near the head of Lake 
Geneva you change cars. Of course I 
thought the dog would be transferred by 
the porters, and I seated myself comfort- 
ably in the other train. Soon it started, 
and what was my surprise to see Drapeau 
looking sadly out from his little window in 
the train we had just left. Luckily, our 
train switched back to the station. Here I 
bustled about among the guards and port- 
ers, ordering them to transfer my dog, but 
they shrugged their shoulders exasperat- 
ingly as they answered, ''Oest a vous, 
monsieur. 

It was not easy to move that leviathan, 
but finally, with the assistance of my com- 
panion and two liberally bribed attendants, 
we dragged him out, each holding a leg, 
and forcibly projected him into the dog- 
quarters of the new train. Drapeau was 



My Dog 55 

too badly used up to resist. He could 
hardly breathe. But about six o'clock in 
the afternoon, when we reached Geneva, 
the air became fresher, and he plucked up 
courage. The next problem was to get 
him to the hotel. We dragged him from 
his compartment, and hauled him through 
the station to a cab. In the cab Drapeau's 
vigor seemed to be entirely restored, for it 
took the full strength of both of us to keep 
him from jumping out of the window, and 
a yelling crowd of small boys followed us 
through the streets. At the Hotel de la 
Paix the guests were just walking in to 
dinner. All stopped to look, and found us 
amusing. We were a picturesque sight 
with our alpenstocks, our leggings and 
spiked shoes, our flannel shirts, and our 
begrimed and travel-worn appearance (the 
result of a week's tramp), hanging on for 
dear life to a big dog to prevent his getting 
away. The porter told us of a stable near 
by, where he thought they would keep 
the animal, and we had him conveyed 
thither. It turned out to be a poor place 
for him, and so, a few days later, I marched 
with him myself four miles along the dusty 
roads south of the lake, and left him in 



56 Protean Papers 

charge of a farmer in the neighborhood 
who kept a '*dog hotel" of the most ap- 
proved variety. My banker was to pay 
him a franc a day until Drapeau left for 
Paris. Then I went to Italy. In Rome I 
received a letter from the farmer, telling 
me he was 'desolate to inform Monsieur 
that he could not longer keep Monsieur's 
dog for less than two francs a day.' *' He 
kills my chickens, he fights with my other 
dogs, he leaps my fence, which you know 
is a high one, and three times I must walk 
to Geneva to restore him." I could make 
no other arrangement, so the two francs 
had to be paid. 

When at last I reached Paris, I ordered 
Drapeau sent on to me. It was thirty-six 
hours from Geneva to Paris by the omni- 
bus-train, and the dog had to be fed. So a 
sort of travelling apartment, a huge crate, 
was built for him, and plentifully supplied 
with straw. There was a trough for his 
food, and a large quantity of meat was 
provided. At Paris the hotel porter went 
with me to the station for the dog. We 
had to break up the crate with an axe be- 
fore we could get him out. Then there 
was a scene quite like the one at Geneva, 



My Dog 57 

the dog being thrust into a cab that would 
hardly hold both him and the very unhappy 
man who clung desperately to his collar, 
seeking to repress his frantic efforts at leap- 
ing out of the window. In this manner 
we were driven through the streets of Paris, 
attended by a horde of uproarious gamins 
who ran along the side of the cab, delighted 
at the unaccustomed spectacle. At length 
we stopped at the door of a dog fancier's, 
and when Drapeau entered he was saluted 
by a vigorous barking from perhaps a score 
of different kinds of dogs that were chained 
against the wall. A deep low growl was 
his answer, and it was followed by instant 
silence among his awe-stricken auditors. 
But it was soon clear that he could not stay 
long amid such surroundings. His presence 
ruined the happiness and threatened the 
lives of the other dogs in the establishment. 
So I rented a vacant lot surrounded by a 
high fence, and in it a suitable dog-house 
was constructed. The keeper I had engaged 
agreed to take Drapeau each day for a walk 
on the boulevard, while I was to be absent 
for a month in Spain. 

When I returned to Paris, the poriier at the 
hotel came to me with a sad face and said: 



58 Protean Papers 

*^ Ah, Monsieur, I must tell you of a great calamity. 
Monsieur's dog was walking on the Boulevard one day 
with his keeper, and he saw the dog of a certain Major 
Duval. The Major slipped and fell, and his dog started 
to run, when Monsieur's dog, no doubt attributing some 
fault to the dog of the Major, broke away from his chain 
and instantly destroyed the dog of the Major, and Mon- 
sieur has been condemned in the court to pay a fine of 
four hundred francs for the destruction of this dog, and 
Monsieur's dog has been arrested as security for that sum. " 

Investigating the matter, I found this was 
only too true. I sought Major Duval, in 
the hope of making some reasonable com- 
position, but he grew so fervid in his praises 
of the wonderful qualities of the dog Dra- 
peau had killed that I was grateful the 
judgment against me was no heavier, and I 
paid it. 

I could not bring Drapeau to America 
on the steamer on which I had taken pas- 
sage, since that particular line ''would not 
take dogs," so I sent him by a French 
line, in care of the butcher. I met the 
vessel on its arrival, and found Drapeau 
chained to one of the bulwarks, with blood- 
shot eyes, looking misanthropic. Two or 
three sailors as they passed exclaimed, 
^'Qu'il est mediant! '' So this beneficent 
creature of the Hospice had been trans- 



My Dog 59 

formed into a wild beast by his sad ex- 
periences with the world. I brought him 
to my house with some difficulty. The 
animal had by this time cost me, including 
damages, board bills, gratuities, transporta- 
tion, and minor items, some five hundred 
dollars, and now the question came up 
what to do with him. We kept him for a 
while in our back yard, but the small square 
grass plot behind the city house did not 
afford scope for his activities. He became 
friendly with Rosa, the cook, and very 
playful with her. He would put his paws 
against her shoulders while she was hang- 
ing out the clothes, and roll her over, until 
she threatened to leave. Moreover, it was 
not safe for any visitor to put his head out 
of the back door. Drapeau was always 
alert. Somehow the dog was not *'in 
harmony with his environment," and after 
a few months I earnestly wanted to sell 
him. I advertised, ''A Genuine St. Ber- 
nard Dog, Bought at the Hospice," saying 
all the sweet things about him that I 
could, but no answers came to my ad- 
vertisements. 

Finally, on Broadway, I saw at the side 
of a stairway leading down to a basement 



6o Protean Papers 

a stuffed black-and-tan terrier, with one 
eye out. This indicated, as I thought, a 
dealer in dogs ; so I went down and inter- 
viewed him. Terms were agreed upon; 
he would keep the dog until sold, and 
would sell him on commission. Drapeau 
remained a week or two there without 
result, until the dealer said we would have 
to take fifty dollars for him. Meantime I 
heard of a gentleman who offered seventy- 
five. I went down to get my dog, offering 
the dealer his commission, but the man 
refused to let him go, declaring the dog 
should not be removed from the shop until 
I had paid twenty-five dollars. I expostu- 
lated in vain. Finally I offered a compro- 
mise, but the man was inflexible. He was 
in possession and was master of the situa- 
tion. I did not mean to be swindled in so 
shameless a fashion, so I went to the Marine 
Court and sued out a writ of replevin. It 
was placed in the hands of marshal Murphy, 
a mild little man, to be served. We went 
up to the dealer's, the marshal showed the 
paper, and demanded the dog. 

''All right," said the dealer, ''there he 
is — take him!" 

Drapeau stood tied to a large crate at one 



My Dog 6 1 

side of the basement, while a variety of 
smaller dogs game-cocks, and other ani- 
mals were in coops and cages around 
the room, or tied to the wall. The offi- 
cer approached Drapeau. *'Here, doggy, 
doggy," said he, in his gentlest and most 
persuasive manner. Drapeau gave a deep 
growl and the officer stopped. 

'' Will he bite ?" asked the marshal. 

"You ought to have seen him drag that 
crate after him trying to get at a man yes- 
terday,'' remarked the dealer. 

The marshal stood aghast — the arm of 
the law was powerless! I was sitting on 
a chest in the middle of the room, watching 
the performance, when the dealer quietly 
said to me: 

*'Mebbe you 'd like to see what you are 
settin' on.?" 

I made no objection, and he lifted the lid 
of the chest and out from a bed of cotton 
at the bottom of it came the heads of two 
great anacondas! It seemed to be a sup- 
ply store for menageries and circuses. I 
sought the other side of the room. In 
the meantime Murphy had disappeared. 
By the the time 1 had followed him into 
the street to recall him, he was wholly 



62 



Protean Papers 



invisible — I do not know how many 
squares away. 

I went back to the basement, and then 
and there the dealer and I made a bargain, 
with the anacondas between us — he was 
trying to stuff them back into the chest. 
He agreed to send Drapeau to the new 
owner for the sum of fifteen dollars, to be 
then and there paid. The cash was counted 
out and the dog sent, from which moment 
he disappears from history. 




ON MEXICAN MOUNTAINS 



ALTHOUGH Popocatapetl and Orizaba 
are higher than Mont Blanc, the 
Cordilleras of Mexico, as a whole, are by 
no means so picturesque as the Alps. The 
mountains are not so steep, and they rise 
with more regularity. A great elevation 
is attained only by a few isolated peaks. 
The ranges are not more than ten or 
twelve thousand feet high. In this tropical 
climate there is little snow. There are 
practically no glaciers. Ixtaccihuatl and 
Popocatapetl do not look so high as the 
Weisshorn or the Jungfrau, because the 
starting-point, the plateau from which they 
rise, is itself eight thousand feet above the 
sea. Even Orizaba, which, on its eastern 
slope, descends to the Tierra Caliente, is 
by no means so impressive as many of 
the Alps, for the rise is so gradual, the 
summit is so distant from the lowland, 

63 



64 Protean Papers 

and the cap of snow at the top is so small 
that its great height can not be appreciated 
from any single point. 

The climb up the cone of a volcano is 
by no means so difficult as the scramble 
among the tumbled masses of the Alps. 
The rope and ladder are unnecessary. 
There are no crevasses. Gorges and preci- 
pices are rare, and it is seldom that even 
an ice-axe is required. On the other hand, 
there is need for much endurance. Good 
lungs and a sound heart are necessary, for 
it is not an easy thing to toil up a steep 
incline of lava dust at a great elevation. 
The ''mountain sickness,'' w^ith its nausea, 
headache, dizziness, and lethargy, is very 
common. One of my companions in- 
stantly dropped asleep when he reached 
the ridge of the crater of Popocatapetl. 

Before climbing any of the great volca- 
noes, it seemed wise to have a little pre- 
liminary practice among the lesser peaks, 
and Ajusco, the highest of the summits 
in the great mountain wall on the west of 
the valley of Mexico, was selected for the 
first attempt. It is nearly fourteen thou- 
sand feet high. The way is by rail up to 
the station of Ajusco, thence on horseback 



Mexican Mountains 65 

to a point perhaps two thousand feet be- 
low the summit, then on foot to the top. 
The superintendent of the Cuernavaca Rail- 
road kindly made arrangements for our 
expedition. We left Mexico early in the 
morning, arriving at Ajusco station about 
ten o'clock. There was no train back in 
the afternoon, but a '' push car " was pro- 
vided for us, and on this the roadmaster 
would take us down to the valley after 
we had made the ascent. There was no 
lodging place at Ajusco, but a box car 
had been placed upon the siding in which 
we could swing our hammocks, should 
we be belated and compelled to remain 
at the station all night. Horses were in 
readiness for the ascent, as well as a 
mo^o, or Indian boy, to show us the way up. 
Fried eggs and beef, and black beans 
and coffee were served in the agent's 
tent before our start. The mo^o bought 
sardines and bread for the journey at an 
Indian village near-by, and we began the 
ascent. The mountain looked hardly a 
rifle-shot from the station, yet it was a 
good four hours' climb, first up a gentle 
slope for several miles to the foot of the 
peak, then by steep zig-zags through the 



66 Protean Papers 

forest. It was about 12:30 when the boy 
told us, just at the edge of the timber line, 
that ''this is as far as the horses can go," 
and, indeed, we thought it was quite as 
far as they ought to go; but he added, 
very unexpectedly, that he would stay 
with the animals to take care of them, 
and he pointed out to us the direction to 
the top, which he said was not quite two 
hours away, but which was wholly in- 
visible. We suggested that he go with 
us, but he answered, '* Somebody may 
come and take the horses.'' He was im- 
movable, so we set out alone. There was 
no path. At first the way was very steep, 
over volcanic rocks, partly bare and partly 
patched with grass, at an angle of nearly 
forty-five degrees; but there was good 
foothold everywhere. At last we could 
see the cairn and cross that mark the 
summit. The weather had been warm, so 
there was no snow, though two days 
later the mountain was clad in white half- 
way down. In point of fact, it did not 
take us an hour to reach the top from 
the place where the climb began. The 
view from the summit is very fine. On 
one side is the valley of Mexico, with its 



Mexican Mountains 67 

two great volcanoes, Popocatapetl and 
IxtaccihuatI, standing at the entrance like 
two huge sentinels clad in white mantles 
of snow. On the other side many moun- 
tain ranges rise, one behind the other, 
toward the Pacific. There is much more 
verdure on the western side and the air 
is clearer, for over the great plateau there 
is a light brown haze, which comes, they 
say, from the dust of the valley, and rises 
so high that only the great snow peaks 
lift their heads above it. At several places 
there were slender, cloudy pillars of dust, 
raised by little whirlwinds moving slowly 
across the plain. Some of these were two 
or three thousand feet high. These cy- 
clones are not dangerous, but it is most 
disagreeable to be caught in one of them. 
Elsewhere the dust cloud was thin enough 
and we could see long distances. At vari- 
ous points below us rose little ant hills 
(for so they seemed), small volcanic cones 
that besprinkle the valley, extinct now, 
but lively enough, no doubt, in times 
gone by. 

We stayed perhaps half an hour at the 
summit of Ajusco. The wind was cold, 
but we had little difficulty in breathing. 



68 Protean Papers 

We descended rapidly and reached the 
station at 5:30 in time to take the ''push 
car." This was hauled upon the track; 
we took our places upon a comfortable 
spring seat in front and started down 
hill. The grade was two and a half feet 
to the hundred, the track was smooth 
and well ballasted, and we were soon 
going like the wind, skirting the east side 
of the western wall of the great plain of 
Mexico, with the big snow volcanoes, the 
lakes, the towns, the ant hills, all before 
us — a toboggan slide of thirty miles, and 
with no long walk up hill. Part of the 
way we went at the rate of twenty- 
five miles an hour, around curves and 
down long inclines, and at seven o'clock 
our guide, the roadmaster, deposited us 
safely upon a tram-car bound for the City 
of Mexico. 

Toluca was the next mountain to be 
ascended, but the trouble was that nobody 
knew anything about it. The guide-book 
said it was fifteen thousand feet high, and 
surely it must be somewhere near the city 
of the same name. I went to the American 
Consul-General, but could learn nothing. 
Finally, I found a man who said there was 



Mexican Mountains 69 

a Baptist missionary in the city of Toluca 
who could tell us. So we took the train 
for that city. When we arrived there we 
found that Mr. Powell, the missionary to 
whom we had been directed, was absent 
in Mexico, and manifold were the accounts 
given by hotel keepers, cab drivers, and 
others, of the proper way to climb the 
mountain. Some said it would take two 
days, others said three, some said you 
could go on horseback, others that you 
must go on foot. None of them had ever 
tried it. And there was that great white 
beauty at their very doors, tempting them 
to come and stand upon its summit and 
see spread before them the glories of the 
earth! How men could spend their lives 
in the presence of such a mountain and 
not try to climb it is hard to understand. 

Mr. Powell returned to Toluca in the 
evening and called upon us at our hotel. 
We had gone to bed, but asked him in 
and had a lively talk in the dark. He had 
been up the mountain several times. You 
could go to the crater on horseback through 
a gap at the side; after that it was a scram- 
ble to the summit. The first thing was to 
ride about fourteen miles across the valley 



70 Protean Papers 

to the village of Calimaya, at the foot of 
the mountain. So, next day, we secured 
a vehicle with three mules and a horse, 
with an Indian boy to drive and another to 
go along and help yell and jump down 
every little while and lash the leaders into 
a fine gallop. The vehicle was a cross 
between a barouche and a buckboard, ac- 
commodating itself to the double require- 
ments of great splendor and rough Mexican 
roads. We had been recommended by Mr. 
Powell to provide ourselves with plenty of 
arms and ammunition; so we bought an- 
other revolver, he loaned us his carbine, 
and we became a travelling arsenal. There 
had been rain the night before, with much 
snow on the volcano, and the clouds hung 
far down its sides. The air was cool and 
fresh, and the drive was exhilarating up 
the valley of Toluca, with ranges of moun- 
tains on each side, and the huge volcano 
slowly unwinding itself from its cloudy 
garments till it stood out white and clear 
before us. The boys in front kept up a 
continuous shouting, *'Mulas! Caramba! 
Hi, hi! " and much besides that is untrans- 
latable. We reached Calimaya just as 
twilight fell. It was a low-roofed village 



Mexican Mountains 71 

built along a straight climbing street, with 
a big church and high-walled convent yard, 
and just opposite to these the '' Palacio 
Municipal/' The boys drove to a large 
stable, where they unhitched the mules, and 
then conducted us to a little fonda, or 
restaurant, on the opposite side of the 
street. The proprietor was very drunk 
and talked, in a thick voice, Spanish that I 
could not understand, but while supper 
was preparing he went out with us to hunt 
Pablo Mendoza, who was to be our guide. 
Pablo was doubtful. The snow had been 
heavy. We could never gain the summit. 
Perhaps we could reach the crater. We 
must have two mo[os to help, and six 
mules for the party. We told him to go 
ahead. Our intoxicated host was to pro- 
vide chickens, sausages, bread, and hard- 
boiled eggs. After supper in the dingy 
little fonda, we sought our night quarters. 
A room had been provided for us at the doc- 
tor's, opposite, — a room filled with surgi- 
cal apparatus and medical library, but now 
two beds were introduced ; one was made 
up on the floor, and for the other there 
was an iron bedstead. We retired early. 
A little after ten a voice was heard at a 



72 Protean Papers 

small aperture in the shutters near my bed. 
It was the voice of Pablo Mendoza : 
''Pepe, Pepe, tell the Senores I shall not 
wake them at 3:30 in the morning, as I 
promised. It is useless. The snow is too 
deep. The mountain cannot be ascended.'' 
I arose and had a colloquy with Pablo 
through the small hole in the shutter. He 
refused to try it. There was nothing to 
do but acquiesce, so we turned back to 
our beds. But on Tuesday, said Pablo 
Mendoza, the snow would surely be 
melted. We would try again next Tues- 
day. So we rattled back to Toluca, the 
two boys yelling, and the men and women 
and donkeys that thronged the road with 
their picturesque costumes and burdens of 
food, and crockery, and hay, all scattered 
to right and left as they heard us. In the 
afternoon we returned to Mexico. 

Mexicans have strange ways of doing 
business. I was to telegraph to Pablo 
Mendoza on Tuesday, before starting from 
the capital, and he was to answer whether 
the day was suitable for the climb. If so, 
we would leave on the two-o'clock train. 
I sent the message at eight o'clock in the 
morning, as soon as the telegraph office 



Mexican Mountains Tz 

opened. We waited six hours for an an- 
swer, but none came. Finally we started 
on the afternoon train from Mexico, taking 
our chances upon being able to make the 
ascent. A four-horse vehicle met us at the 
station at Toluca and drove us to Calimaya 
by moonlight. We reached the village 
about eight o'clock. We hunted up Pablo 
Mendoza and learned from him that he had 
received the telegram at 1 1 130 and that he 
answered it immediately, telling us not to 
come for three days yet, since the snow 
was still deep upon the mountain. We 
learned afterwards that this telegram had 
been delivered at our hotel in Mexico at 
five P.M. Such is the telegraphic service 
conducted by the Mexican Federal Govern- 
ment. But now that we were at Calimaya, 
we refused to ''wait another day,'* as 
Pablo suggested, or to return, so he finally 
said, vamos a ver and that he would try 
to procure the horses, mules, and men. 
There were three of us. Three horses, 
three mo^os, and six mules were secured, 
and Pablo was to waken us in the morning 
at half past three. We slept in two com- 
fortable little rooms behind the tienda the 
principal village store at Calimaya. At a 



74 Protean Papers 

quarter past four we awakened ourselves. 
We called up the boy at the tienda who 
let us out. All was silent in the streets 
of the village. We asked the boy to con- 
duct us to Pablo Mendoza's house so that 
we might arouse our guide. He re- 
fused. If he left the tienda there would 
be no one to shut the door behind him. 
Then we went to the fonda where they 
had promised to have our chocolate and 
eggs ready, as well as a basket of provi- 
sions for the journey. All was silent. 
We thumped and yelled loudly enough to 
awaken the dead. Finally a young man 
who slept in the entrance room on the 
floor got up, roused the women, and then 
went to bed again. We entered and they 
made ready our chocolate. Again we asked 
to be conducted to the home of Pablo 
Mendoza, but there was no one to go with 
us. A small boy was there. Could he 
not go with us.^ ''He was too little," 
said his mother. Then there was a girl, a 
few years older. Could she go.^ ''She 
was afraid." Perhaps the young man in 
bed upon the floor would go. "No, he 
was asleep." Perhaps the good woman 
herself would go with us. " No, she must 



Mexican Mountains 75 

prepare the breakfast." So we started out 
alone and shouted through the silent streets, 
*' Pablo Mendoza! Pablo Mendoza! " but 
in vain. Finally we saw a man. We fol- 
lowed him. He got away. Then another, 
but he did not know where Pablo lived. 
Then, after an hour or so, we espied two 
others. Would they show us ? Yes, if 
we gave them a peseta. Very well, we 
would give it. ''But give it to us now." 
We did so, and just around the corner they 
brought us to Pablo, who had collected 
two horses and a man, the first installment 
of our convoy. We started from the vil- 
lage at six o'clock, just two hours late, two 
precious hours when the climb fills the 
whole day. We expostulated with Pablo, 
but he took it as a matter of course and 
merely said that we had started quite soon 
enough. 

Our way wound, at first, up through 
fields of maguey and corn, past the small 
hamlet of Saragossa, then we entered a 
magnificent forest of tall pines quite clear 
of underbrush, with openings and fine 
views of the broad valley and distant moun- 
tains behind us, and before us the white- 
capped volcano. We stopped at the hut 



76 Protean Papers 

of a vaqueria, or cow pasture, for fresh 
milk. Soon the snow began, far down in 
the forest, but it was not deep, nor did it 
become so till we emerged into the open 
land above. Then there were patches where 
horses and mules floundered, and we had 
to dismount and walk. Once a mule loaded 
with blankets, provisions, and ''traps" 
fell, rolled over half a dozen times down 
the slope of the mountain, then rose and 
walked on as if nothing had happened. 
Thus we climbed the ridge that surrounds 
the crater and then, descending, we halted 
and took our lunch in the snow, by the 
side of a small lake within. The meal was 
a good one. The chickens had been 
brought in alive to the fonda, for our ap- 
proval, the evening before. The sausage 
had plenty of garlic in it, but was not un- 
palatable to a properly disciplined stomach, 
and the coffee was strong, though cold. 
There was another larger lake within the 
crater, said to be nearly two miles in cir- 
cumference. It was a little higher up, and 
my two companions started out to visit it 
and to climb a hill which rose in the midst 
of this great amphitheatre of crags. They 
were both faster walkers than 1, and I de- 



Mexican Mountains "j^ 

cided to climb slowly to the summit of 
what the guides said was the highest peak, 
and await their coming later in the after- 
noon. One of the guides went with me, 
and two others with my companions. I 
crossed a stretch of snow and then mounted 
one of the horses and was carried up steep 
slopes of lava dust and ashes till the poor 
animal gave out. Then another pull on 
foot over a snow slope, and, finally, a slow, 
careful climb over a ridge of rocks to the 
summit. It was a warm pull up the slope, 
but a cold wind met us at the top of the 
ridge, and an overcoat and a stiff pull at 
the bottle of taquila (the strongest Mexican 
fire-water) were both necessary. 

The view from the summit was fine, but 
it was much softer in character than any 
from the high peaks of the Alps. The ridges 
of the Sierra Madre stretched out below us. 
The two great volcanoes, Popocatapetl and 
Ixtaccihuatl, were visible in the dim dis- 
tance, and it is said that on a very clear 
day you can see the two oceans from this 
place. Looking at the other peaks that im- 
mediately surrounded the crater of Toluca, 
I saw two which seemed to me to be a 
few hundred feet higher than that which I 



78 Protean Papers 

had scaled. I spoke of this to the guide, 
who had assured me that the one I climbed 
was the highest of all. His only answer 
was, ''Well, perhaps they maybe." Such 
is the mountain guide in Mexico. 

I supposed the others would join me on 
the summit, but the thin air of this great 
altitude had wearied them and they were 
resting near the lake below. 

There are many curious things about this 
crater. Mr. Powell, the missionary at 
Toluca, told me there was an Indian altar 
here with painted hieroglyphics. I asked 
the guides to show it to me, but they knew 
nothing of it. On the way up the peak I 
saw a stone which seemed to me to have 
upon it a bas-relief of the plumage of an 
Indian warrior. The feathers were quite 
regular on each side, with a head band be- 
low. This might, of course, be a mere 
natural freak, but it looked to me like a 
rather fine piece of sculpture, broken only 
at one corner. It was too heavy to carry, 
and I had to leave it. 

We rode rapidly down to Calimaya, and 
when we reached it, at five in the afternoon, 
our wagon was in readiness. 

A ride of an hour and a half brought us 



Mexican Mountains 79 

back to the city of Toluca. By some strange 
oversight I had neglected to procure smoked 
glasses for the snow climb. The glare had 
been dazzling, and all night long I lay 
awake with a sharp pain in the eyes. At 
one time it was almost impossible to open 
or close my eyelids, but before daylight the 
inflammation had ceased. In addition to 
this eye trouble, the climber of Toluca is 
sure to get plenty of '' local color " upon his 
nose and cheeks, that bright, shiny red, 
peculiar to the mountaineer, which renders 
shaving a most painful operation, and makes 
those who meet you stare at you as if you 
were a candidate for the Keeley treatment. 
The conductor on the local train to Mex- 
ico was one Drake, from Mississippi. He 
offered us cigars and St. Louis papers, 
talked politics, and advocated the spoils 
system. He had just recovered from an 
illness. What was it ? He had been shot 
by the agent at one of the stations, a Mexi- 
can, who had called him a vile name, which 
he had resented by knocking the fellow 
down. Had the man been punished for 
shooting him .^ ''Well, no; he died." 
''How did he die ? " "From the blow I gave 
him when I knocked him down.'' " Well, 



8o Protean Papers 

did n't they do anything to you for killing 
him?" ''No, they couldn't." ''Why 
not?" "Well, they fined me five dollars 
for hitting him, and then when he died 
I had been punished once, and they could n't 
punish me again." 

Before coming to Mexico we had been 
told that it would be a hard thing to find a 
good hotel outside of the capital. On the 
contrary, we found it much harder to get a 
good meal or a good room in the City of 
Mexico than at many other places. When 
I went to Ameca-Meca preparatory to 
climbing Popocatapetl, I supposed that 
at this small town I should find nothing fit 
to eat, so I determined to start well fed at 
the restaurant of the Interoceanic Raiload 
Company, in the City of Mexico, before 
the train left. ' ' What have you ? " I asked. 
"Nothing," was the answer. It was two 
o'clock in the afternoon and I had had 
nothing to eat since the morning coffee. 
"Give me a cup of chocolate and a roll, or 
an egg and a glass of milk. " ' ' Hay nada " 
— there is nothing! So I left with an empty 
stomach and satisfied myself with tortillas 
and glasses of pulque at the stations on the 
way. But when I reached Ameca-Meca I 



Mexican Mountains 8i 

found a clean, cozy little hotel, where they 
gave me a dinner of six courses, all excel- 
lent, served by Conchita, a soft-voiced In- 
dian maiden of tv^elve years, who did her 
duty in a manner worthy of the most ex- 
perienced garfon. The proprietor was a 
Spaniard, a Gallego. His sideboard was 
rich, decorated with fine china and the 
best glass, and his cellar was stocked with 
good wine. There was a huge bath-room, 
with carved oak and velvet armchairs; there 
was a big front hall, where hams hung sus- 
pended by long poles from the ceiling, and 
in the hall a spiral staircase which led to a 
clean bedroom in a big dormer on the roof, 
where I slept between the whitest of sheets, 
with a tall canopy over me, a picture of the 
Redeemer just above my head, and a ''Vir- 
gin of Guadalupe " on the opposite wall, 
who turned her soft eyes upon me as I 
woke in the morning. It was an ideal inn 
for a small country town. 

I made arrangements for three horses, 
three guides, a mule for the luggage, an 
arriero, or mule driver, and a mo:{^o to help 
generally. My two companions were to 
join me the following morning, when we 
would start together for the rancho of 



82 Protean Papers 

General Ochoa, the owner of Popocatapetl, 
from whom we had obtained the necessary 
permission to climb the mountain. Then, 
in company with two Mexican boys, who 
had never left my sight for an instant since 
they took my hand luggage from the train, 
I climbed the Sacromonte, a high hill back of 
the village, from the summit of which is to 
be seen a glorious panorama of the two great 
volcanoes of the Mexican plateaus — Popo- 
catapetl, ''the mountain that pours forth 
fire," and Ixtaccihuatl, ''the white woman/' 
The sky was cloudless. The evening lights 
were magnificent, and it w^as like gazing 
on the Mont Blanc range from the Flegere. 
The lines were softer, however, and al- 
though the two great peaks were really 
higher than any among the Alps, yet they 
had no companions, there were no great 
glaciers surrounding them, and the eleva- 
tion of the valley, some eight thousand 
feet, reduced their apparent height. 

On the following morning, just before 
our start for Popocatapetl, the guides in- 
spected our outfit, our overcoats, blankets, 
sombreros, leggings, gloves, goggles, ice- 
axe, etc., and declared all complete except 
our hobnailed shoes. These they said 



Mexican Mountains 83 

would never do. The snow was too hard. 
We must buy some sort of foot-gear with 
an unheard-of name. We did not know 
what it was, but told the guides to fetch 
us three pairs. They brought back a huge 
piece of flexible leather and some leather 
thongs. Out of this they would make us 
the sort of sandals they wore themselves. 
We were to wrap our feet up in cloths and 
fasten on the leather with the thongs. At 
this point we rebelled. Our hobnails were 
good enough for the snows and ice of 
Switzerland; why not for those of Mexico ? 
Was it a different kind of snow ? We 
would wear no such bandages as they 
brought us. Those would do better for 
the gout than for Popocatapetl. The guides 
said: *' Doubtless the senores knew best, 
but they must take the risk." So we took 
the risk. 

We started from Ameca-Meca about half 
past eleven. It was a ride of six hours to 
the rancho of General Ochoa, where we 
were to pass the night. Our path lay at 
first across the valley, which is fertile and 
very green for the tableland of Mexico, 
where the prevailing color is a dusty gray. 
There was dust enough on our road, how- 



84 Protean Papers 

ever, thrown up by our own horses and by 
the vast number of donkeys and mules that 
we met coming down the mountains with 
loads of wood on their backs, — such broad 
loads that it was often hard to get far enough 
to right or left on the road to keep out 
of their way. Soon the bridle path began 
to climb the foothills, and then it wound 
up the higher ridge which separates the 
two great volcanoes. This ridge must 
be twelve thousand feet high, at least four 
thousand feet above the plain of Ameca on 
one side and that of Puebla and Cholula on 
the other. Here, however, was the great 
highroad to Mexico in Montezuma's time, 
over which the army of Cortez passed, 
with much diificulty and suffering, in its 
first march to the capital. Near the top of 
the ridge we found the Indian woodcutters 
who had supplied the donkeys with their 
loads. These men had erected for them- 
selves little thatched cabins of long grass, 
just large enough to crawl into for shelter 
from the frosty air of the night. A little 
over the top of the ridge, and on its east- 
ern side, was the rancho. It was a 
rude shed with a few stones in the middle 
for a fire, and a hole in the corner of the 



Mexican Mountains 85 

roof to let the smoke out. Planks were 
laid upon an incline a foot or two above 
the floor on one side of this shed, and 
upon these hay was scattered in rather 
scanty quantities. This was the common 
bed of guides and travellers. Another shed, 
still more primitive, gave shelter to our 
horses. A third was used in the prepara- 
tion of sulphur, which is found in the 
crater of the mountain, and extracted with 
immense labor. There had been very few 
fine views on the way up, but near the top of 
the ridge the immense volcano just in front 
of us seemed ready to crush us under its 
vast weight of snow. The clouds which 
had been hanging over it for most of the 
afternoon lifted about sunset, and the full 
moon, which rose when daylight vanished, 
lit it with a very pale light till it seemed 
like a huge but beautiful spectre. 

The guides brought in branches of trees 
and kindled a fire in the hut, by the light 
of which we consumed a part of the liberal 
basketfuls of food provided for us at the inn 
at Ameca-Meca. 

We had heard the most contradictory 
accounts of the time necessary to climb the 
mountain. A guide in Mexico had told us 



86 Protean Papers 

seven hours; the man from whom we had 
hired the horses said four hours; the guides 
themselves thought about six hours. We 
determined to be on the safe side, and told 
them to call us at two o'clock for the start. 
The moonlight would guide us sufficiently, 
and since we had to make the descent and 
then return to Ameca-Meca before dark, it 
was best to start early. But the guides 
said no. Half past three or four o'clock 
would be early enough. There was no 
use in rising before that. At last we tried 
to compromise on three o'clock and they 
assented, but one of us heard them say 
among themselves that they did not pro- 
pose to waken us till four. The remedy, 
however, was easy. There was no sleep- 
ing on that wretched hay, especially after 
the fire had gone out and the cold wind 
began to chill our legs and feet in spite of 
our blankets. If the guides would not 
waken us we would waken them. Indeed, 
we had very little confidence in being 
wakened at all. According to our best 
experience a Mexican never wakens any- 
body. When two o'clock came we were 
glad enough to tumble out of the hay, light 
a fagot, start the fire, and raise a commo- 



Mexican Mountains 87 

tion among the guides. The sleepy fellows 
would have snored through it, but I offered 
to each of them a good glass of taquila, 
and their eyes opened. We warmed a 
bottle of coffee, ate some eggs, and dis- 
sected two chickens in aboriginal fashion. 
Before three o'clock the horses were saddled 
and we were on our way. The moonlight 
made the path almost as plain as day, even 
where it was nothing but a narrow trail 
down the side of a small gorge and up 
again beyond. Then the poor animals 
struggled over vast inclines of lava dust, in 
which they sank to their knees, and they 
panted in the thin air so pitifully that we 
had to let them rest every few minutes. 
At last we reached a straggling collection 
of rocks which our guides said was the 
end of the horse trail, and thenceforth we 
had to try the lava dust ourselves. 

The climbing was abominable. For every 
step forward we slipped back nearly as far, 
but we flattered ourselves that when we 
reached the snow line it would be better. 
In fact, however, it became worse, for at 
this time of the year there was no smooth 
snow spread over the mountainside, but 
small wedge-shaped blocks of dirty ice, all 



88 Protean Papers 

leaning in one direction (eastward), and it 
looked for all the world like a vast grave- 
yard with the stones tilted over. The 
average height of these blocks was about 
four feet, and we had to straddle them and 
cut off the ridges with the ice-axe when- 
ever they were too high, or cut steps in 
their sides. Occasionally there would be 
little narrow pathways between them for 
short distances, but this was over the loose 
lava dust, which slipped back as we 
climbed it. The ascent was steep, nearly 
forty-five degrees in many places, but there 
was always a fair foothold, not the sHghtest 
danger, no rock-climbing nor steep snow 
slopes; it was simply slow, tedious, and 
very wearisome, and as the air became 
thinner the exertion required was very 
great, and the rests for breath and renewed 
energy became more frequent and longer. 
Our hobnailed shoes served us better than 
the bandages in which the guides had 
swathed their feet; we slipped less than 
they. The guides were most unsatisfac- 
tory. At first they went ahead, all three 
of them, leaving us to climb alone as best 
we might. After a while we insisted that 
one of them should accompany each of us. 



Mexican Mountains 89 

My companions, younger and more agile 
than I, soon distanced me, and it was 
nearly six hours after leaving our horses 
that I finally surmounted the narrow ridge 
which surrounds the crater of Popocatapetl. 
During the last hour it was impossible to 
take more than six or seven steps without 
resting. At the final ridge a grand scene 
presented itself — a great circular chasm, 
more than a thousand feet deep, with wild, 
rugged rocks on every side, and, at several 
places below, great clouds of sulphur smoke 
steaming up, which impregnated the air 
with its odor and made us realize that this 
crater was indeed one of the gates of our 
terrestrial Hades. 

The exterior view was by no means so 
impressive. Popocatapetl is so high above 
the plain and above all the surrounding 
mountains (except Ixtaccihuatl, just op- 
posite) that everything looked dwarfed and 
dimmed by the immense distance. Clouds 
had drifted around the mountain during 
our ascent, and at several times had threat- 
ened to envelop us, but they had all floated 
away, and the sky was entirely clear while 
we were at the summit. Below us stretched 
the great valleys of Puebla and Mexico. 



90 Protean Papers 

There was a faint brown mist over all the 
landscape. The peaks of Orizaba, Malinche, 
and Ixtaccihuatl rose above it, sharp and 
clear against the sky. We could see from 
fifty to seventy-five miles in all directions, 
but at this dusty time of the year the val- 
leys looked like unsubstantial clouds. The 
peaks alone were the realities. Ixtaccihuatl 
was the nearest. It is a magnificent moun- 
tain, much more beautiful from the plain 
than Popocatapetl itself; but it is long and 
narrow, and only the end is visible from the 
higher peak — not the broad side which you 
see from Ameca-Meca or Puebla. The view 
was certainly impressive, but not so fine as 
that which had been spread before us from 
Toluca. Popocatapetl, although over seven- 
teen thousand feet high, seems rather like a 
huge hill than a great mountain. It is so 
regular on every side that the rugged face 
of the crater is all that impresses one with 
its Alpine proportions. 

We skirted the edge of this vast chasm 
for some distance, and then, returning, 
began the descent. At some seasons of the 
year travellers can slide down the slope on 
petatas, or strips of matting. But this was 
not possible now, and we picked our way 



Mexican Mountains 91 

through the icy tombstones back to the 
slopes of lava dust, and then, half walking, 
half sliding, down these slopes, we reached 
the rock and the cross, where the horses 
came to meet us and take us back to the 
shed where we had passed the night. A 
little refreshment at the hut and then five 
hours more on horseback to the town. 
Ameca-Meca is visible from the crest of the 
ridge and seems quite near, but hour after 
hour of dusty travel passes before you reach 
it. An excellent supper awaited us, how- 
ever, on our arrival at seven o'clock, a little 
after dark, then a deep sleep in the soft 
beds of the Spanish inn, and at 6:30 in the 
morning we were on our way to the City of 
Mexico. 




SOME OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING 
GOETHE 



IT is interesting to read the conflicting es- 
timates of Goethe made by his contem- 
poraries. In Germany he held a dictatorship 
in literature more absolute than that of any 
other author anywhere. Only a short time 
before, Voltaire had exercised a literary 
sovereignty of a like character over the en- 
tire continent, ahd Doctor Johnson, full of 
insular prejudices, had dominated, in much 
the same fashion, the literary thought of 
Great Britain. But neither of these men 
made a profound and lasting impression 
upon literature. They had both been great 
men of their time, but the admirers of Goethe 
judged rightly when they considered that 
his genius was not transitory but permanent, 
not local but universal, belonging to every 
race and every speech into which his 
thought could be translated. But if during 

92 



Concerning Goethe 93 

his lifetime his own country was enthusias- 
tic, his reputation abroad was of slow 
growth. When Goet:{^ von Berlichingen 
appeared, the French litterateurs and the 
French king himself considered it a base 
imitation of all that was worst in the Eng- 
lish drama. De Quincey, while acknowl- 
edging the merits of Goethe, devoted most 
of his celebrated essay on the German poet 
to a refutation of ''the extravagant claims 
of his admirers," and insisted that the 
foundations of Goethe's reputation were (i) 
his great age and literary fecundity, (2) his 
official rank, and (3) the enigmatical charac- 
ter of much that he wrote. Goethe, said 
De Quincey, had mistaken his calling. He 
ought to have confined himself to pastoral 
poetry, of which Herman und Dorothea 
was so admirable a specimen. His reputa- 
tion would surely decline. 

In the essay concerning Wilhelm Meis- 
ter, De Quincey criticises mercilessly, and 
sometimes with great justice, the behavior 
of the characters in the novel. Other critics 
have observed that no gentleman could have 
written Wilhelm Meister. The answer 
of Goethe's friends is perhaps sufficient, 
that it was written, not so much by a 



94 Protean Papers 

gentleman, as by a man ; that the faithful- 
ness of the portrait was the predominating 
principle. In fact, the keynote of all Goethe's 
writing is truth embodied in poetic form. 

Perhaps no man who ever lived was a 
more complete type of humanity than 
Goethe. Its reason, its passions, its strength, 
its weakness, its beauty, its deformities — 
he embodied them all. I know of no pic- 
ture which more completely represents the 
complete man than the picture of Goethe. 
I know of no head which represents the 
fulness of human characteristics so well as 
Goethe's head in the statues and models 
which have come down to us. And it is 
not only his appearance and characteristics 
which seem to embody humanity, but his 
career itself He had tried all things. His 
life was as complete as any recorded in his- 
tory. He lived to a ripe old age, amid 
favorable surroundings. From his ances- 
tors he acquired the traits which underlay 
his greatness: something of his father's 
sturdiness, but much more of his mother's 
serenity and cheerfulness. His education 
was such as would naturally contribute 
to the making of a many-sided man. It 
might be called desultory, but it was cer- 



Concerning Goethe 95 

tainly comprehensive. Besides his Latin, 
Greek, Italian, French, and English, he had 
a little chemistry and mathematics, a good 
deal of alchemy, a smattering of theology 
and law, interspersed with riding, fencing, 
dancing, drawing, and music. Thus he nat- 
urally acquired some knowledge of a great 
variety of subjects. His life flowed in an 
unbroken stream of prosperity. Goethe 
realized, perhaps more than any one else, 
the old pagan idea of blessedness — a sound 
mind in a sound body. 

His employment at the court of Carl 
August of Saxe Weimar was specially favor- 
able to his literary life. The little German 
dukedoms and principalities, which were in 
many respects a curse to the land, were in 
one way an advantage. They formed nuclei 
of artistic and literary culture. Each of the 
petty princes became a Maecenas to the poets 
and artists whom he attracted to his court. 

There were, it is true, some disadvantages 
in this. The love of liberty, one of the 
highest inspirations to poetry, was wanting. 
Adulation stood in the place of love of 
country. Goethe has been charged with lack 
of patriotism, and his service at court was 
perhaps responsible for this shortcoming. 



96 Protean Papers 

But such service has also compensating 
advantages. It is not necessary for the 
poet to seek merely popular applause. The 
artist can be truer to his ideals. And thus 
it was with Goethe. He wrote many things 
which were not appreciated at the time by 
the public, and it was by such work that his 
influence upon the thought of Germany at 
last became so absolute. 

His literary productions were as many- 
sided as his life. He has not done the best 
work in any one department of literature. 
In the drama, where he reached the highest 
point of his literary career, he is inferior to 
Shakespeare, as a poet he is behind Homer 
and Dante, as a novelist he is far below 
Thackeray, as a scientist his place is subor- 
dinate, as a philosopher he is often inconsist- 
ent and irrational, and yet he showed a 
catholic spirit, a power to be all things 
that man is capable of being, which is not 
found elsewhere in literature or in life. 
So multiform is his genius that his works 
would hardly be attributed to one man if 
it were not known that Goethe was the 
author. There is Goeti von Berlichingen, 
strong, rugged, unfinished, an admirable 
portraiture of character, in which form and 



Concerning Goethe 97 

dramatic unity are disregarded; there is The 
Sorrows of Werther, a masterpiece of the 
sentimental school, a little morbid, but none 
the less true to human nature, awakening 
the sympathy and tears of a generation; 
there is Iphigenia, the best reproduction in 
modern literature of the cold, statuesque, 
classic drama; there is Torquato Tasso, 
embodying the intellectual and spiritual 
struggle of the Renaissance; there is Eg- 
mont, a wonderful medley of deep passion 
and exalted patriotism; there is Hermann 
und Dorothea, the most perfect pastoral 
since the time of Theocritus and the Geor- 
gics; there are Goethe's scientific doctrines, 
his forecast of the great doctrine of evolu- 
tion, his theories of color and light, inac- 
curate perhaps, but still a proof of his 
many-sidedness; and, finally, there is Faust, 
the only great dramatic poem of ancient 
or modern times worthy to rank with the 
masterpieces of Shakespeare. 

The secret of much of Goethe's power 
was that he drew the sources of his literary 
work from his own experience — an ex- 
perience so variegated and indeed universal 
that it becomes to us, through the medium of 
his genius, the experience of humanity itself. 




ON THE FRAILTIES OF LITERARY 
CRITICISM 

y^ nnHE world pays more reverence to criti- 



T 



cism than criticism deserves. I think 
this comes partly from the fact that, oftener 
than we think, we take men at their own 
estimate of themselves, and there is in the 
very fact of censure an implied superiority 
over the thing censured. As the judge out- 
ranks the litigant, so the critic rises in our 
imagination above the author, especially if 
he handle the latter without gloves. For 
it is unfavorable criticism which is most 
impressive. We know that any fool can 
applaud, but we think it requires discrimi- 
nation to find fault. Hence the great repu- 
tation acquired by Voltaire's Pococurante, 
who disdained Homer, Virgil, Horace, 
Cicero, Milton, the man of science — every- 
body, until an enraptured community ex- 
claimed: ''What a prodigious genius is 

98 



Literary Critics 99 

this Pococurante! Nothing can please 
him!'* 

In the simplicity of inexperience I, too, 
used to believe in critics. I did not like to 
make up my mind on the merits of a book 
until I heard what these gifted creatures 
had said of it. I was particularly humble 
in the presence of those who, like one of 
the editors of Shakespeare, had said that 
common readers ** must perforce either take 
the results of deep scholarship on trust or 
else not have them at all," — in other words, 
that we were incapable of forming any just 
opinions of our own. Scholars of such in- 
accessible attainments awakened my awe. 

But now I know them! After a writer 
has read the reviews of his own works, he 
is qualified to ''swear at the court" with 
unction, if not with impartiality. Nay, he 
has even a better remedy than the litigant. 
For he may constitute himself a court of 
appeals, review the decisions he does not 
like, and even convict and pronounce sen- 
\tence against his accusers. 

This is possible because of the peculiar 
constitution of the tribunals by which art 
and literature are judged. 

When the Pope dies and the Holy See 



li 



loo Protean Papers 

becomes vacant, the Spirit descends upon 
the entire College of Cardinals, or at least 
upon the *'odd man," in selecting the suc- 
cessor who is to fill it. When a Grand 
Lama dies, his coadjutor selects from a list 
of new-born babes three names, and from 
these the abbots, after a week of prayer, 
single out by lot the successor of the dead 
potentate. Thus the Divinity makes known 
its will and points out the little body in 
which is to reside the reincarnated soul of 
wisdom and philosophy. 

Our method of choosing the arbiters of 
art and literature is more simple. There is 
no need for death to leave a vacancy, nor 
for any convocation to await the illumina- 
tion of the Spirit. The inspiration is strictly 
personal. Each candidate, after contempla- 
tion of his own transcendent qualifications, 
selects himself and crowns his own head 
with the tiara of infallible judgment. 

And so I here propose to crown myself. 
Luckily no preliminary training is required. 

** A man must serve his time to every trade 
Save censure. Critics all are ready made." 

Dean Swift indeed proposes some quali- 
fications. ''Sleeping, talking, and laugh- 



Literary Critics loi 

ing/' he says, ''are qualities sufficient to 
furnish out a critic." But Swift required 
too much. Many a critic is a solemn owl 
to whom laughter is as distant as the 
stars. 

Being called therefore, as I know myself 
to be, to review my reviewers, I leap at a 
bound to a higher pinnacle than the ones 
they occupy. If the critic of Shakespeare 
dwells on loftier heights than the great 
dramatist, how supremely exalted must 
be the station of him who shall pass upon 
the merits of criticism itself! I propose 
to stand on the apex of the pyramid. 

Come then, ye arbiters of human genius, 
and let me see of what stuff you are com- 
posed. For now am I the pedagogue and 
you must stand before me while I lay about 
me with vigor and apply the ferule to every 
delinquent! And there are delinquents 
enow, and of many kinds. Let me enumer- 
ate. First : 

THE INDOLENT CRITIC 

**0 ye chorus of indolent reviewers, 
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers! " 

Why Tennyson should call you a chorus 
indeed, I know not, for you speak not 



/ 



I02 Protean Papers 

together, and the thing you utter is neither 
music nor harmony of any kind. Your 
uproar is more like that of the singing 
school where, though all sang at once, 
each uttered the words he knew best and 
set them to the tune he knew least. You 
blow all ways, like the winds of Eolus. 

Once I wrote a romance and submitted 
it for criticism. One man liked it on ac- 
count of its evident historical basis; an- 
other declared that the historical incidents 
had crowded out the story. One admired 
it on account of the directness with which 
it appealed to the reader; another insisted 
that the author should not have addressed 
the reader at all. One admired the sim- 
plicity of the style, and another attacked 
its mannerisms. One spoke of the beauty 
of the strange legends which were intro- 
duced, while another declared that such 
episodes marred the narrative. One said: 
''A mystical tone runs through the book 
that increases the strangeness of the story," 
while another found fault with this because 
it made the story improbable. All of 
which goes to prove that whatever you 
say in your story, and however you say 
it, some men will like it the better on 



Literary Critics 103 

that account, while others will find fault 
with it for that particular reason. So 
whatever an author may do, let him not 
V. try to please everybody. 

But although Tennyson may have gone 
far afield when he spoke of reviewers as a 
chorus, he was well within the bounds 
of truth when he said that they were in- 
dolent. Nobody knows this better than 
the publishers of the books submitted to 
their judgment. 

In issuing a revised edition of a short 
monograph, I was told by my publisher 
to write a prefatory statement showing 
why the revision was made, ''as a guide 
for those critics who would not have time 
to read the book." The advice was oppor- 
tune, for 1 find in perhaps a dozen of the 
clippings before me that the entire review 
is composed of a transcript of this preface. 
In a number of cases the words are given 
verbatim, in others the reviewer seeks 
(sometimes ineffectually), to give the sub- 
' stance of them. 

There were critics, it is true, whose 
ambition was not content with showing 
that they had read the fourteen lines of 
this preface. One of these gave evidence 



I04 Protean Papers 

that he had also examined a whole leaf 
of the text, since his observations con- 
cluded with an extract taken from near 
the bottom of the second page. Others, 
after copying the preface, would skip to 
the final paragraph. The first and last 
sentence both appearing, how should it 
be known that the reviewer has not read 
a word of what lay between ? 

One of the reviews of a biography I 
published some years since clearly shows 
that the reviewer had read the first nine- 
teen pages of Volume 1. In his epitome 
of the contents of these pages, the subject 
of the biography is safely brought into the 
world, lives with ''two old aunts" until 
he is fifteen years of age, becomes a drug- 
gist's clerk and then a hatter, goes to 
college, marries, practises law, becomes a 
country judge, and afterwards attends 
a law school. The reviewer feels, no 
doubt, that he ought to give the hero a 
good start, so my statesman is projected 
famously into life's trials and burdens. 
But this is all! What else becomes of 
him we know not, except that it appears 
there were ''exciting political episodes in 
which he took a leading part," that he 



Literary Critics 105 

made *' important speeches/' and ''though 
unaided in life," he had a ''splendid 
career/' 

The omission of the subsequent facts was 
perhaps accounted for by the statement that 
"the history of the part he played in poli- 
tics is pretty well known," from which it 
would appear that the only details impa- 
tiently awaited by an expectant world were 
those concerning his birth, his schooling, 
his trades, his law practice, and his "two 
old aunts." 

I know a lady who shows great aptitude 
in acquiring a conversational use of foreign 
languages — an aptitude due mainly to her 
fearlessness. She will embark upon the 
tortuous stream of the most complicated 
sentence if she has merely a knowledge of 
the definite article with which to com- 
mence it. Once begun (and the article is 
always a good beginning) the sentence has 
to unroll itself somehow — and indeed it 
generally does, though there is often a puz- 
zled expression in the face of the listener 
when it is concluded. 

Here the reviewer has given to his in- 
quiring reader the article — not perhaps the 
definite article, but what of that? If a 



io6 Protean Papers 

courageous imagination can not fill up the 
void and construct the edifice of a states- 
man's life and character by the aid of the 
specimen brick which is thus furnished, so 
much the worse for those who lack this 
imagination. 

Of course a critic has to choose from 
what part of a book he will make extracts, 
but by adopting the theological device of 
selecting a text ad aperturam libri he might 
make his method of review a little less self- 
evident. 

THE ENTHUSIASTIC CRITIC 

Although in the foregoing instance I 
seemed unable to detain my reviewer and 
keep him awake beyond the nineteenth 
page, I find myself reassured by the uncon- 
scious flattery of another article, where the 
critic (though he says very little about the 
book) seems to have absorbed from its 
pages an enthusiastic admiration for the 
hero, and follows the important steps in 
his career with two columns of approving 
plaudits. The author of this review does 
not hesitate to sign his name in full, and 
his words come like sweet waters after a 



Literary Critics 107 

toilsome journey, bringing joy to the heart 
of the biographer and showing him in a 
most practical way that, however humble 
may be his task in following the footsteps 
of the great, it is a task not devoid of 
opportunities for inspiration. 

THE CAUTIOUS CRITIC 

But it is not every critic who is willing 
to '' let himself out '' in this generous man- 
ner. Most of them feel the restraints im- 
posed by the obligations of their awful 
calling. 

Some indeed seem to be over-cautious in 
pronouncing judgment. For instance, one 
reviewer says of the author's statement 
regarding the probability of a conflict be- 
tween the civilization represented by the 
Slav and that of the Anglo-Saxon: *'We 
are neither inclined to doubt this nor to 
affirm it with him." It is hard to over- 
praise the discretion of a critic who is un- 
willing to affirm a proposition upon which 
he is equally unwilling even to entertain a 
doubt. It is feared, however, that very 
few results could be achieved by criticism 
if its votaries were all so prudent. 



io8 Protean Papers 

THE UNDESCRIPTIVE CRITIC 

But it is not caution alone that produces 
sterility in criticism. Many reviewers con- 
fine their estimates to adjectives v^hich are 
undescriptive and meaningless. 

A class in English literature recently met 
in one of the lecture-rooms of a woman's 
college, and the instructor called for criti- 
cisms from the students. ''Miss , 

what have you to say regarding the tragedy 
of Hamlet?'* There was a slight hesita- 
tion, a blush, and then an answer, ''Why, 
I liked it. Professor!'' and as the exegesis 
thus concluded, a ripple of laughter went 
softly round the room. 

Much of the criticism I encounter is of 
the same character — barring the hesitation 
and the blush. The books are "interest- 
ing," "well worded," "readable," "in- 
structive," though how or why the reader 
must find out as best he can. 

The son of the Vicar of Wakefield learned 
that the whole secret of the criticism of 
paintings consisted in a strict adherence to 
two rules: the one, always to observe that 
the picture might have been better if the 
painter had taken more pains ; and the other, 
to praise the works of Pietro Perugino. 



Literary Critics 109 

The canons of much of our literary criticism 
seem to be quite as simple. A small cata- 
logue of adjectives, applied indiscriminately, 
supplies the needs of the art. 

THE TRUCULENT CRITIC 

But the adjectives are not always com- 
plimentary. Some of them, indeed, are so 
far the opposite as to lead to a suspicion of 
rabies. I have specially noticed that anti- 
imperialists, being apostles of ''peace and 
good- will " and opponents of '' militarism *' 
and forcible measures, are, more than all 
others of the children of men, the propri- 
etors and usufructuaries of that vocabulary 
which naturally leads to armed conflict. 
While their combativeness may not rise to 
the dignity of assault and battery, they are 
more than usually prone to the taking of 
that preliminary warlike step known to the 
Hoosier as ''a provoke." One of these 
special messengers of the olive branch says 
that the author's ''inexhaustible supply 
of views " is " nonsensical," " monstrous," 
"a mere appeal to racial hatred of the same 
low order as that which leads white men 
to lynch black men," and that the author 



no Protean Papers 

himself, though posing *'as an independ- 
ent and disinterested philosopher/' is ''the 
most dangerous kind of demagogue/' for- 
tunately, however, of ''the type which is 
left farthest behind in the race of life/' 

THE CRITIC WITH INSIGHT 

It is acknowledged, I believe, that the 
highest and rarest qualification for criticism 
is "insight," the power of reasoning from 
" internal evidence," from the book back to 
the writer. By means of this gift, spuri- 
ous passages are eliminated, genuine manu- 
scripts are distinguished from forgeries, and 
truth from romance. Nay, more, hidden 
authorship is sometimes revealed, that of 
Bacon, for instance, as the writer of Shake- 
speare's plays. Whole histories have been 
written by the aid of this subtile power. 

Blest with this quality in no small de- 
gree, one of my critics has undertaken 
to write part of my life, constructing it 
out of the biography which he was review- 
ing. I moved to Indiana just before the 
death of its great war governor, and 
when afterwards I began his biography 
my prepossessions were not altogether 



Literary Critics m 

favorable to him. It was only as the 
work progressed from day to day, as 
I delved into contemporary material and 
saw the rugged but majestic lineaments of 
an heroic character come slowly forth from 
the confused masses around it, that doubt 
gave way to admiration, that the labor 
became a pleasure, and I followed a great 
life with sympathy, indeed, yet I hope 
not without fairness, to its close. But my 
critic (whose review appeared in the organ 
of the opposite political party) proceeds 
to deduce from the biographer's detailed 
knowledge of local events the fact that he 
resided in Indiana at the time. 



** Probably we are yet too near the stormy period in 
which he played such a conspicuous — indeed such an 
overshadowing — part to expect from any writer a ju- 
dicial view of his character and work. Least of all is 
this to be expected from one who, like the author of 
this biography, lived in Indiana throughout that stormy 
period, and who, although but a boy when that strong 
stern figure was at the helm, breathed an atmosphere 
surcharged with passion and prejudice." 

Happy indeed are those who can thus 
reason unerringly from effects back to 
causes, and give true explanation and 



112 Protean Papers 

excuse for partisan prejudice and political 
strabismus, all from the internal evidence 
of the work itself ! 
Then there is 

THE ANALYTICAL CRITIC 

He too finds in a book much of which 
the author never dreamed. He is the 
man who ''rates" you and ''classifies" 
you, as I am doing now to him by way 
of retribution. 

The "reader" of the house which pub- 
lished a story I had written asked me: 
' ' How do you classify it ? Is it an historical 
novel, or a pastoral, or a satire ? " I an- 
swered him that I did not think it was 
my business to classify it; that as Tammas 
Haggart said to the club at the pig-sty, 
"A body canna be expeckit baith to mak 
a joke and to see't, that wad be doin' 
twa fowk's wark," neither ought an author 
to be expected to write a book and to 
classify it too; that I could only say that 
if the reader of the volume could get from 
it a tithe of the pleasure that it gave me to 
dream the strange scenes of the story 
(whose background I had seen in remem- 



Literary Critics n 



o 



brance), it might still go unclassified and 
yet I would remain content. 



Far be it from me to say that discriminat- 
ing criticism does not exist. Some reviews 
are admirable, presenting in small compass 
the gist of a whole work, with observations 
that are both just and discerning. The 
judicious reviews are, however, little more 
than oases in a barren waste. The general 
average of criticism is sodden enough, 
and the great mass of reviewers form a 
motley crew who proffer their half-baked 
opinions to a public whose mere instinct 
would be a safer guide than such coun- 
sellors. 

And it is before the judgment-seats of 
such folly and ignorance that there have 
been summoned not only the vagabonds 
and delinquents in authorship, but also 
those splendid names which, despite the 
censure of contemporaries, have lived to 
adorn literature through succeeding genera- 
tions. It was contemporary criticism which 
valued Dante for his physics and meta- 
physics, his absurd theology and smatter- 
ing of ancient learning, rather than for his 

8 



114 Protean Papers 

sublime diction and his superb creative 
power. It was contemporary criticism 
which crippled the French drama by sense- 
less and arbitrary rules; which estimated 
the poetry of Milton as inferior to that 
of Dryden; which puffed the wretched 
Montgomery into gigantic stature; which 
sought to stifle the first flight of Byron's 
muse; which hounded Tennyson through 
long years of uncertainty, and smothered 
the flame of Keats's genius in disappoint- 
ment and death. 

In view, then, of the frailties of criticism, 
what is to be done ? Advice is the com- 
mon and inexhaustible capital of all man- 
kind, the one kind of wealth whereof 
prodigality entails no future want. Let 
me offer, therefore, three words of advice. 

The first is to the editor of the news- 
paper or periodical, and it is this: 

Do not try to criticise all the books that 
are sent to you and which you have not 
the time, even if you have the other quali- 
fications, to review properly, but organize, 
if you will, a syndicate in criticism, a harm- 
less sort of a trust, which can specialize 
the work and have it adequately performed. 
Then you may print, simultaneously from 



Literary Critics 1 1 5 

slips or from ''boiler plate," something 
which at least will not make you ridicu- 
lous. 

Second, since the press is very slow in 
taking advice, and may not take mine, we 
had better not wait till this great trans- 
formation is effected, so my next bit of 
counsel must be to the public, and it is: 

Do not believe a word the reviewer tells 
you, but judge for yourself. 

And now in the third place, to my dear 
fellow author, whom I love more tenderly 
than ''any little reptile of a critic," and far 
more than I love the world at large, to 
him I would impart in confidence the 
advice once given me by one of great 
skill and experience in such matters. He 
told me that if I wanted to be sure of 
a "good" review, I had better "write 
it out" myself. While I listened to his 
words the clouds parted and a great field 
of wonders lay spread before my imagina- 
tion. "Is it possible," I thought, "that 
the authors themselves are the sources of 
those appreciative reviews that appear in 
periodicals which I have considered the 
repositories of literary wisdom ? Can it 
be that criticism is like a Cyclopaedia of 



ii6 Protean Papers 

Contemporary Biography, where each flat- 
tering display of eminent and charming 
qualities is furnished (together with a lib- 
eral subscription) by the gentleman who 
forms the subject of the sketch ? " 

I know not, for I am unsophisticated. 
But it is wise to be on the safe side and 
take no chances, so if you want a ''good " 
review, and are sure you can get it pub- 
lished, you had better ''write it out" 
yourself. 




BROAD VIEW OF THE DISAD- 
VANTAGES OF A UNIVERSITY 
EDUCATION 



{T is a very limited horizon that most 
people have of this great world. Very 
few^ can realize that there is anything really 
important in it beyond the narrow sphere 
of their own activities. The man, for 
instance, who is accustomed to the social 
advantages of the metropolis finds it hard 
to understand how one who has always 
lived on a remote plantation of the South 
may be as courtly a gentleman as any in 
the circle with which he is familiar. The 
man from the far West, on the other hand, 
finds it impossible to believe that those 
who have been brought up in the lap 
of luxury in the East can have those sturdy 
qualities and that manly courage which 
he regards as the best part of his own 
character. 

117 



ii8 Protean Papers 

In a limited way, I know something of 
these misunderstandings, for about half 
of my life has been spent in the East, 
and the remainder in the Mississippi valley. 
There is many a man on the Atlantic sea- 
board who considers all that lies beyond 
the Alleghanies wild and woolly, and there 
are not a few who dwell in the valley of 
the Mississippi who consider the people 
of the East snobbish, effete, degenerate. 
In point of fact, while the Western man 
has generally less of what is technically 
labelled culture than his Eastern brother, 
he has, on the other hand, I think, broader 
and juster views of life, and perhaps quite 
as ample a knowledge of the things most 
necessary for the practical conduct of 
life. 

The same kind of misunderstanding ex- 
ists between the college man and the man 
who has not had the benefits of a uni- 
versity education. The graduate of the 
universities can not always appreciate the 
many splendid intellectual qualities required 
for the development of a great business 
enterprise by a man who, perhaps, can 
not speak the English language correctly; 
while, on the other hand, the successful 



University Education 119 

business man is apt to look with contempt 
upon the training of the university. 

There is little need to speak of the bene- 
fits conferred by the higher education, 
but since the ability to look at a question 
on all sides is among the most rare as 
well as the most valuable of human en- 
dowments, I desire to offer some sugges- 
tions in regard to the disadvantages of a 
university training, and to express some 
opinions quite different from those I used 
to hold when I was a student. 

I can remember that at that time we all 
quickly became impressed with what we 
considered the aristocracy of cap and gown, 
the feeling that the college man was inevi- 
tably a superior being to the non-college 
man. This feeling was most aggressive, I 
think, during our Freshman year. By the 
time we became Seniors the consciousness 
of this superiority had softened down so 
that while it was to be taken as a matter 
of course, it did not need to be asserted. 
With the years which have followed gradu- 
ation, it has, I think, become extinct. We 
now meet the rest of the world on equal 
terms. Indeed, many of us have come to 
recognize as our actual superiors in intellect 



I20 Protean Papers 

men who do not know one word of Greek 
or Latin, men who could not prove, to save 
themselves from perdition, that the square 
of the hypothenuse of a right-angled tri- 
angle was equal to the sum of the squares 
of the other two sides. 

We need not be told, for we all know, 
that an educated man of equal merit and 
energy has a better chance in life than he 
who has not had access to the training that 
our institutions of learning afford ; just as a 
rich man, who remains uncorrupted by the 
luxury which wealth encourages, has a bet- 
ter chance in the long run than a poor 
man. But there is not seldom a gain in 
the absence of these advantages. The very 
lack of them will sometimes nerve the man 
of pluck to more earnest efforts, and while 
we find a large proportion of university 
men among the successful and distinguished 
men of the world, let us not forget that 
some of the most illustrious of all have 
been- men without such opportunities. 
Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatists, 
placed Bohemia by the shores of the sea; 
Washington, the first of Americans, could 
not always spell correctly; Lincoln, pre- 
eminent among the statesmen of this cen- 



University Education 121 

tury, drew his inspiration, not from the 
school, but from the forest and the farm; 
Herbert Spencer, first among living phi- 
losophers, studied at home; John Bright, 
the most distinguished among the English 
orators of his generation, received nothing 
but a business education. These things 
tell us that, after all, it is the man, rather 
than his technical training, which is the 
most important ingredient in ultimate suc- 
cess, and that the college is not the only 
place in which to procure an education. 
Those who have been brought up within 
its walls are apt to form too narrow a con- 
ception of what education means. They 
imagine that it is co-extensive with the 
curriculum. If they have studied languages, 
mathematics, logic, and philosophy, they 
think that languages, mathematics, logic, 
and philosophy constitute an education. 

Now this misunderstanding of the real 
perspective in education is all but universal. 
Each community has its own standard. 
The education demanded of the Chinaman 
who seeks political place, in many matters 
greatly exceeds our own requirements. He 
must give explanations by chapters and sen- 
tences of the commentaries on the classic 



122 Protean Papers 

philosophy of China. He must point out 
the inaccuracies of the old sages who wrote 
of ''astronomy and the five elements/' 
He must criticise the estimates of the char- 
acter of reigning princes made by the an- 
cient historians. This kind of examination 
involves a wide range of reading in the 
native literature, though it contracts the 
mind to look upon that literature as con- 
taining all that is worth knowing in the 
world. 

A man may have the scientific knowledge 
of an Edison, or the philosophy of a Spen- 
cer, yet by the Chinese test he will still be 
very ignorant. And with us, a mandarin 
may have devoted half a lifetime to amass- 
ing the abstruse and recondite lore con- 
tained in the writings of the fathers of the 
Celestial Empire, yet according to our 
standard he knows very little. Many of 
our own educators have been guilty of 
narrow - mindedness of this sort. They 
have conventionalized certain things (not 
always the most useful and desirable) and 
have labelled these things an education. 
Whatever his scientific education may be, 
the man who has not been through the 
classical course of the German University 



University Education 123 

is an ** Ungebildeter Mensch/' There is 
always a tendency about the thing techni- 
cally called an education to arrogate to itself 
a superiority over that kind of training 
which is not accompanied by the proper 
trademark. Now there are things not set 
down in the curriculum which to some 
men are a better education than Latin, 
logic, mathematics, or philosophy. In track- 
ing his game or his enemy, the Indian is 
better educated than we. What we need 
is a proper catholic spirit, which appreci- 
ates knowledge of every kind wherever 
found, and which is ready to extend the 
right hand of fellowship to every form of 
useful instruction, though it be not of our 
own kind. 

The instances are not few in which the 
learning of the time has been a positive 
detriment to the natural growth of science 
and even of letters. The ''forty immor- 
tals '' of the French Academy, the learned 
arbiters and censors of French literature, 
have had, it seems to me, a most injurious 
effect upon the development of that litera- 
ture. The stern rules laid down for the 
conduct of the drama, verse and rhyme 
inexorably prescribed, the narrow unities of 



124 Protean Papers 

time, place, and dramatic action autocrati- 
cally imposed, the ''harmony of colors" 
insisted upon to such a degree that serv- 
ants and subalterns must speak the same 
poetic dialect as the heroes of the play, — all 
these things crippled and deformed the 
French drama, until it became a colorless 
imitation of Greek models, instead of a 
luxuriant growth, developing according to 
natural laws. And even to-day the art of 
rhetoric, very useful when offered as the 
adviser of talent, becomes positively nox- 
ious when it assumes the functions of an 
autocrat and tyrant of literary production. 
In letters, as well as in political life, the 
largest liberty is the condition of the health- 
iest development; and literary genius, like 
organic life, must grow and bear fruit, not 
according to the rules which learning pre- 
scribes, but according to the laws of its 
own being, according to the individual 
characteristics of the author. 

It ought to make the man of learning 
modest to reflect how much of error there 
has been in the so-called knowledge of 
the time. How long the world has been 
in unlearning the things that have been 
learned before ! How long it took mankind 



/ 



University Education 125 

to disbelieve the Ptolemaic theory that the 
sun revolved around the earth! What a 
flood of orthodox erudition v^as poured out 
upon Galileo! 

The learning of one generation is often 
the laughing-stock of the next. How many 
hundreds of years did the learned disciples 
of alchemy seek the Philosopher's Stone, 
which was to turn the dross and refuse of 
the world into gold! For how many cen- 
turies have theology and law joined hands 
for the suppression of the impossible crime 
of witchcraft! How many millions of hu- 
man beings have died unnaturally under 
the manipulations of the men of medicine, 
who bled them and dosed them until the 
forces of nature refused to react and their 
lives became sacrifices to the learned misin- 
formation of the medical profession ! 

What would have been the future of this 
New World if the daring originality of 
Columbus had succumbed to the learning 
of the Council of Salamanca? For how 
many generations did the absurd and use- 
less distinctions between nominalists, real- 
ists, and conceptualists distract the learned 
world! What a clog the metaphysical 
learning of past centuries has been upon 



126 Protean Papers 

the real advancement of science and civil- 
ization! For how many centuries did 
knowledge remain stationary because men 
sought it only in the lore of the fathers, in 
the vellums of a brighter and more original 
antiquity ! All this time Nature was vocal 
with a cry to be interpreted. She uttered it 
in the thunder, demanding that man should 
explore and train to his service the forces 
which forged the thunderbolt. She hissed 
in steam her scornful reprobation of the 
ignorance which knew not how to harness 
that mighty agent to the ships and chariots 
of the world. In the petals of every 
flower she besought mankind to unfold 
the methods of its growth and beauty. In 
beast and bird and fish she held up to eyes 
that would not see, that great law of evo- 
lution by which every marvel of organic 
life has been developed from the simplest 
cell. From the stars she flashed the mes- 
sage what they were, and asked nothing 
but the spectroscope for the interpretation. 
But through all these ages, the learning of 
the world, shut up in cloisters, reiterated, 
parrot-like, the truths and errors of past 
times and spent itself in metaphysical sub- 
tleties. 



University Education 127 

And can we say of the learning of to-day 
that it is free from this same fault ? Do we 
not still often mistake the arbitrary product 
of our imagination for the final truth of 
science ? I remember studying in college 
a system of Empirical Psychology, as it 
was called, The Mind as Revealed in Con- 
sciousness, and my only criticism of the 
very learned work which formed our text- 
book was that the mind was thus revealed 
to the consciousness of some other man, 
not to mine. To him it might be the truth 
of science, to me it was the work of a 
V not very healthy imagination. 

When so much of the learning of the 
schoolmen has turned out false, what se- 
curity have we that the lore into which 
we have been delving is the ultimate truth .^ 
Time perhaps will tell, though it may not 
be the time in which we live. 

Yet even in our own time we discover 
the error of much of our instruction. Take 
for example the so-called science of political 
economy, where we deduced by most ir- 
refutable logic that the men who bought in 
the cheapest market and sold in the dear- 
est, contributed, by means of the beneficent 
and permanent law of competition, to the 



128 Protean Papers 

ultimate wealth and happiness of mankind. 
But now a great doubt arises whether com- 
petition is not destructive of itself as well 
as of the multitudes who perish under the 
wheels of its heavy car, and the effort of 
all modern industrial life is to avoid, by 
wise and economical co-operation, its need- 
\ less waste and destruction. 

So here let me utter a precept of great 
academic heresy. Let us not believe all 
we have been taught. Most of it may be 
true, but unless history is false, all of it 
can not be. Let books and instruction ad- 
vise and guide us, but never control our 
own convictions. We may ourselves add 
to the sum of man's knowledge something 
wiser and truer than that which they con- 
tain. Let us keep our minds in that re- 
ceptive condition which is willing not only 
to learn, but to unlearn, and this from 
every source — from books, from the world, 
from nature, and from the light within our 
souls. 

A wise man is equally removed from 
that illiterate dogmatism which asserts that 
all valuable knowledge is found in practical 
experience, outside of books, and the ped- 
antry which considers that it is all in 



University Education 129 

books. There is one kind of knowledge, 
extremely valuable to all of us, which must 
be acquired mainly by experience with the 
world. This is our knowledge of men. 
We can not learn this from the printed 
page. Shakespeare may lay bare the hid- 
den mainsprings of human action; Tolstoi 
may dissect human nature until we are 
astounded and shocked by the faithfulness 
of the portrait; but, after all, it is a certain 
native intuition combined with practical ex- 
perience which gives us the best knowl- 
edge of men. It is outside the walls of the 
lecture room that these lessons must be 
learned. A life of constant intercourse 
with our fellows is the school which best 
instructs us what they are and what we 
are ourselves. 

There is another kind of culture which 
no books can furnish, which no institution 
of learning can supply — the culture of those 
spiritual faculties, those electrical forces of 
our nature so elusive to the touch, yet so 
powerful in overcoming all things. 

Let us not lose sight of that quality which 
no academic examination can test, but 
which is nevertheless the divinest of all 
human gifts — enthusiasm. Learning alone 



I30 Protean Papers 

has not accomplished half so much. From 
books alone men rarely drink its inspira- 
tion. Its source lies deeper. It was the 
enthusiasm of the unlettered Mahomet 
which drew forth those millions of Saracen 
cimeters for the conquest of the world. It 
was the enthusiasm of Peter the Hermit 
which gave birth to the era of the Crusades. 
It was the enthusiasm of the early abolition- 
ists which began the agitation that culmi- 
nated in the overthrow of African slavery. 
Every martyr whose blood has resanctified 
religion, every daring aggressor whose new 
thought has added to the truths of science, 
every Galileo, every Huss, every Luther, 
every Columbus, attests the power of en- 
thusiasm even more than the power of in- 
tellectual culture. It was in the enthusiasm 
and utter devotion of the unlettered fisher- 
men that Jesus saw fitter instruments for 
the propagation of his gospel than in 
priest, rabbi, scribe, or Pharisee learned in 
the laws of Moses and the Prophets. Un- 
less we have this gift we may have all the 
learning of the time, and it will be of little 
avail. Learning is valuable only on the 
condition that it does not destroy this 
greater and more godlike quality. 



University Education 131 

Let us believe in ourselves. Not that con- 
fidence which arrogates any superiority over 
our fellow^s, but the faith which through 
every disaster continually whispers in our 
ears the prophecy that we will win. We 
may work long and see no result. We may 
knock and hear no answer, nor will an an- 
swer come except to that obstinate endeavor 
which through years of irresponsive silence 
still keeps heart. 

How many times has every great man 
been pushed back in his career! How often 
has genius labored under the burden of dis- 
appointment! What must have been Mil- 
ton's discouragement when five pounds was 
the uttermost he could extract from the 
cupidity of his time for his immortal epic! 
What must have been the weight of dis- 
appointment which oppressed Carlyle when 
he carried the manuscript of Sartor Resar-- 
tus from publisher to publisher and found 
no one to take it! How wonderfully has 
Carlyle himself described man's struggle 
and triumph in that admirable passage in 
his Essay upon Mirabeau! 

*' Victory," he says, "is always joyful; but to think 
of such a man in the hour when, after twelve Hercules' 
Labors, he does finally triumph! So long he fought 



132 Protean Papers 



with the many-headed coil of Lernean serpents; and 
panting, wrestled and wrang with it for life or death, — 
forty long stern years; and now he has it under his 
heel! The mountain tops are scaled, are scaled, where 
the man climbed, on sharp flinty precipices, slippery, 
abysmal; in darkness, seen by no kind eye, — amid the 
brood of dragons; and the heart, many times, was like 
to fail within him in his loneliness, in his extreme need; 
yet he climbed, and climbed, gluing his footsteps in his 
blood; and now behold, Hyperion-like he has scaled it, 
and on the summit shakes his glittering shafts of war! 
What a scene and new kingdom for him ! all bathed in 
auroral radiance of hope; far-stretching, solemn, joyful, 
what wild Memnon's music, from the depths of Nature, 
comes toning through the soul raised suddenly out of 
strangling death into victory and life ! '^ 

So, too, must we believe if we will win 
the victory. It will not come to all, but 
more surely than to others it will come to 
him who, through years of discouragement, 
works on unflinchingly and will not yield. 

Perhaps the main purpose of life is to 
make of our natures fit soil for the seed of 
opportunity. It may be that unto one of us 
some sacred charge may be given. After a 
thousand commonplace utterances, he may 
speak one word, and it shall be God's mes- 
sage to the world. Amid a thousand per- 
ishable pages he may write one line that 
will live as long as the eternal hills. After 



University Education 133 

a thousand fruitless questionings, Nature 
may teach him one simple law or tell him 
one new fact, and his place shall be with 
Newton, and Priestley, and Copernicus. 

Let us so prepare our lives that if the call 
comes we shall be ready, that to the voice 
of the spirit our ears shall be alert, and the 
answer shall be upon our lips, ''Speak, 
Lord, for thy servant heareth." 




A BASEBALL ROMANCE 



BLOCK Island is about fifteen miles away 
— right out at sea. We can see the 
coast of the island very faintly on a fine day, 
and a steamer makes daily trips thither 
when the weather is fair, but of late our 
communication has been much interrupted 
by the storms and the heavy sea. There is 
a large hotel on the island, and the guests 
there wanted to be neighborly, so they 
invited our athletic association to send a 
picked nine to meet them in a friendly game 
of baseball. Our boys started out full of 
hope, and we awaited their return with 
confidence that they would maintain the 
credit of our association, but they came back 
with a score against them of nineteen to one. 
Some grumblers talked about a professional 
in the Block Island nine, and a dissatisfied 
man remarked that they did n't go over 
there to play against the colored waiters of 

134 



A Baseball Romance 135 

the hotel. But Jenkins, who had charge of 
our association, silenced the grumblers, told 
them they ought to be grateful for the 
courteous treatment they had received, and 
that we must do our best to entertain the 
Block Island men properly when they came 
over to play with us. So the charge of the 
matter was placed in Jenkins's hands. We 
all have confidence in Jenkins. To-day the 
Block Island men came; a special tug 
brought them over, and we paid part of the 
expense. They were our guests, and we 
were bound the entertainment should be a 
success. We brought down a brass band 
from Westerly, a gorgeous-looking band 
with white coats and gold lace, — a regular 
Austrian band in appearance, — and we all 
marched out to the end of the long pier to 
the tune of Boulanger's march, to welcome 
the visitors. The sea was high, the tug had 
been pitching frightfully, and there were 
signs that our guests had not been enjoying 
themselves, but we tried to cheer them with 
our music and happy faces and to make 
things pleasant for them. 

Our color was red and theirs was blue. 
The place fairly blossomed with red flags, 
red ribbons, red sashes, and red headgear. 



136 Protean Papers 

The boys pulled out the lower slats from 
the window shades, tacked on pieces of 
red cloth to make little flags, and marched 
in solid column, looking like a band of 
young anarchists. We talked cheerfully to 
the Block Island men, but we did not ex- 
press much confidence that we could beat 
them. Jenkins was sorry to tell them that 
three or four of our nine were sick and he 
had to pick up a scrub lot of fellows to fill 
their places. Indeed, he had been com- 
pelled to take a waiter or two from the 
hotel to ''fill up.'' One of these was a 
little, innocent-looking, baby-faced darkey, 
who rejoiced in the name of Alfred Jupiter 
Smith. It was easy to see that ''Jupiter'' 
(for Alfred and Smith did n't count as parts 
of his name) never could have had much 
experience in baseball, nor, indeed, in any- 
thing else. 

Then there was another man whom Jen- 
kins had " picked up " because he could do 
no better. This man was a professor, and 
a rather seedy-looking one at that. His 
shoulders stooped, he wore spectacles, he 
had a "far-off" look and seemed to be 
studying astronomy; he often rubbed his 
hands gently together and stood on his first 



A Baseball Romance 137 

base looking vacantly into space, with one 
suspender unbuttoned. We all wondered 
why on earth Jenkins had assigned such an 
important place as first base to that sort of 
a man. But Providence always favors the 
unfortunate, and it could be nothing less 
than a special Providence which dropped 
all those balls into his hand just at the right 
instant, to put out some Block Islander who 
was running for first base. The hand 
which caught the ball always happened to 
be the one next to the fellow who was 
trying to make his base, and it seemed to 
touch him involuntarily. 

The ''professor" looked so sleepy through 
his spectacles that the Block Islanders tried 
to steal bases from him, and it was not 
until after five of them had been caught 
out in the attempt that they came to the 
conclusion he was actually awake. And 
then Jupiter! The little fellow was worthy 
of the great Olympian whose name he 
bore. Before the game began we openly 
expressed to the Block Island men our dis- 
approval that Jenkins should make such an 
insignificant waiter boy the pitcher of our 
nine at such a time, and when they saw 
him they offered to increase the odds 



138 Protean Papers • 

against us. We bore this affront with pa- 
tience, but I afterwards learned that some 
of our people consented to take the offered 
terms (ten to one) ''just to stand by our 
home nine, not because there was any 
chance of winning/' But as soon as Jupi- 
ter began to pitch, the Block Islanders batted 
wildly '' into thin air " and sometimes rolled 
over in the attempt. Not once in a dozen 
times could they even run to first base, and 
if they did their joy only lasted for a mo- 
ment. They got no farther. The small 
boys who sat in long rows on the hillside 
near the grand stand soon began to shout in 
chorus, ''What's the matter with Jupiter? 
H-e-'s a-M r-i-g-h-t," and then they turned 
somersaults in concert, and kicked their 
feet in the air all at the same time and yelled 
anew cheer, "Jupiter! Jupiter! Wah! Hoo! 
Wah!" At each new stroke of fine play 
the joyful clash of cymbals resounded from 
the row of seats against the fence, which 
were occupied by the Austrian band, while 
a tinge of melancholy overspread the fair 
faces on the front rows of the grand stand. 
These seats had been reserved for the la- 
dies who came with the Block Islanders, to 
share the glory of their expected triumph. 



A Baseball Romance 139 

The catcher, too, was another man se- 
lected **on the spur of the moment/' But 
in baseball, as in public speaking, it is the 
impromptu which succeeds, and I suspect 
it is just the same sort of impromptu. 
This catcher had a way of getting the ball 
before the batter had any chance at it. He 
never missed. Certainly Jenkins was in 
luck when he hit upon those three men. 
One inning after another was played and 
Block Island could not make a run. Thir- 
teen to nothing was the score at the end of 
the sixth inning. The time was short, the 
guests had to leave and there was only one 
more inning to be played. Then a forgiv- 
ing smile stole over the fine, benevolent 
countenance of Mr. Jenkins. He said 
something to the catcher which we did 
not hear, but immediately afterward the 
ball struck the catcher's arm and hurt him 
badly, so that he missed several times 
and the Block Islanders triumphantly made 
three runs at the finish, amid the wildest 
shrieks of delight from the fair companions 
of their journey and amid the equally em- 
phatic shrieks of derision from the small 
boys. So the game closed 13 to 3 in our 
favor. 



I40 Protean Papers 

Then our band struck up a proud anthem 
of triumph, the small boys with their red 
flags led the way; we formed a hollow 
square around our immortal nine and 
marched in solemn state back to the hotel, 
amid the waving of hundreds of fair hands 
and handkerchiefs brought thither to wit- 
ness our revenge. The Block Islanders 
were cordially invited to come along, but 
they neither shared our enthusiasm nor 
appreciated our delicate attentions. In less 
than thirty seconds after the game closed 
not one of them could be seen. Ever since 
the game began they had spent the time 
howling, first at the umpire, then at the 
catcher, then at Jenkins, then at the whole 
of us, and even the three runs at the finish 
did not dissipate their unreasonable irrita- 
tion. The last we heard of them was that 
a man had hurried into the telegraph office 
and sent the following to Block Island: 

''Beaten; thirteen to three — professional 
battery." 

The last we saw of them they were 
climbing solemnly into the tug one after 
another, and the last we saw of the tug it 
was tossing like a cork upon the waves. 
It was not yet out of sight when Jenkins 



A Baseball Romance 141 

called around him the members of the Ath- 
letic Association. His finger was placed 
suggestively at the side of his nose. This 
is not one of the signs of the association, 
but we all recognized it. 

*'Well, boys, are we even.^'' 

A quiet chuckle was the appropriate 
answer. 

A little behind us stood Amos — Amos 
the prophet, as we call him — a dark-skinned 
son of Ethiopia, who distributes the morn- 
ing news to us at five cents a copy. His 
joy was deep, but it seemed not wholly 
unalloyed. His smile had a chastened 
look. 

** Well, Amos, did you come out ahead ? " 

''Yes, sah, but only ten dollars, sah, and 
when dey was such a chance it ought to 
ben fifty!'' 




■■■ I I ■ .1.11.. M . ; . - i ... - T ■■■ r. ,,, . ,. ; . . .,, , ,,; ^ , ; , -; ., fV« i .,^ , j d 



A VISIT TO YUCATAN 



NO one is lured to Yucatan by the ad- 
vertisements of railway or steamship 
lines, or by delusive circulars setting forth 
the charms of a personally conducted tour 
through fairyland. On the contrary, the 
great difficulty is to find out anything 
about that peninsula at all. It is a sail of 
only thirty-six hours from Havana to Pro- 
greso, yet scarcely anybody in Havana could 
give me any information about Yucatan. I 
asked the salesmen in a number of book- 
stores if they had a guide to the country. 
They smiled as they answ^ered that they 
had never heard of such a thing. Steamers 
of the Ward Line sail every week to Pro- 
greso. I sought information at the office 
of that company, but nobody knew any- 
thing. I learned there was a railroad to 
Merida, but whether it went any farther 
no one could tell. There was a Mexican 

142 



A Visit to Yucatan 143 

fan merchant on the Calle Oblispo — perhaps 
he would know. I sought him out. He 
had been to Merida, but knew of nothing 
beyond. 

'Ms there a hotel there .? '' 

''Yes." 

"Is it a good one.?'* 

"No. Bad." 

"How bad.?" 

"You have travelled in Spain.?" 

"Yes." 

" You have seen bad hotels there ?" 

"Yes." 

"Very bad?" 

"Yes." 

"Well, this is worse than any you have 
ever seen." 

" What is the matter with it ? " 

"The first two or three nights you will 
not sleep." 

' ' Why ? On account of the mosquitoes .? " 

" Yes, the mosquitoes, and — everything." 

This offered a large field for the imagina- 
tion. 

Then I went to the Mexican Consul, a 
courteous gentleman, who told us what 
little there was to tell of the railroads in 
Yucatan, showed us the time tables and 



144 Protean Papers 

rates of fare, assured us that there was a 
hotel in Progreso as well as in Merida and 
other places, and when we asked how good 
they were, answered, ''They are plain, but 
that will add to the interest of your visit." 
There were vehicles, he said, to take us to 
the old ruins; the climate was hot, but not 
specially unhealthy in the winter season, 
and a number of persons went every year, 
both from Mexico and from foreign parts, 
to see these stately relics of aboriginal civili- 
zation. So we resolved to take *' pot luck " 
in climate, hotels, and whatever else was 
to be found in Yucatan. The Mexican Con- 
sul did not speak English, but he made the 
little Spanish that we knew go a long way, 
understanding without difficulty the con- 
glomerate in which we struggled to express 
ourselves, and he illustrated his answers 
with such apt gesticulation that we could 
hardly have failed to make them out if they 
had been Sanskrit or Chinese. 

Then we went to the money-changers to 
get some Mexican silver for our greenbacks. 
Twenty dollars apiece seemed little enough 
to begin with, yet when we got two for 
one in big Mexican coin we began to feel 
as if we had too much ballast aboard, and 



A Visit to Yucatan 145 

we could realize in a small way the mean- 
ing of the laws of Lycurgus, which estab- 
lished iron as the currency for Sparta. 

We left Havana in the midst of a squall 
of rain and wind on the Ori^^aba, a beauti- 
ful, large steamer of the Ward Line, and 
we were surprised, after we had passed 
the narrow strait which connects the bay 
with the sea, to find how well she rode 
the huge swells that came in ''dead ahead." 
But our satisfaction was short-lived. We 
changed our course a little and the wind 
shifted still more, so when night set in we 
were in the trough of the sea and the 
steamer was rolling most unpleasantly. 
We tried to sleep, but were tossed about 
in such lively fashion that our energies were 
devoted exclusively to keeping in our berths. 
One lady, who had propped herself in with 
pillows, was thrown headlong upon the 
floor. We could hear the dishes crashing 
in the pantry and doubted whether enough 
would be left to set the breakfast table. 
Water poured in in great quantities, and 
our efforts to dress next morning were acro- 
batic performances unusual even in great 
storms. A ''Norte" was blowing and the 
sea was high, but the dancing of the boat 



146 Protean Papers 

was greatly in excess of the requirements 
of the storm. The cook was pitched head- 
long across the kitchen. An old gentleman 
who stood at the door of the smoking-room 
was sent flying to the other side of the 
apartment and then back again, cutting his 
head and hand very badly. One of my 
companions had an ugly gash across his 
thumb, and at the table the breakfast and 
dinner rolled into our laps. Toward even- 
ing the wind slackened, but as the steamer 
was flat-bottomed and had little cargo, it 
refused to be comforted. Next day the 
weather was rather better and we anchored 
in the open roadstead at Progreso. A tug 
came out to meet us, tossing like a cork on 
the water, and one after another we took 
a 'Meap for life " upon her deck as she rose 
on the short, jerky waves. The women 
were lowered in heavy casks, cut open at 
one end and part way down one of the 
sides. They were swung off from the 
steamer, and as the tug rose were caught 
by men below and hauled down. There 
was much weeping and screaming, but all 
were at last safely deposited upon the little 
boat and we steamed for the shore, some 
two miles away, where a long iron pier 



A Visit to Yucatan 147 

projected into the sea. There was much 
difficulty in landing, but finally we all came 
safely off and walked down the pier to the 
custom-house. The custom-house inspector 
at Progreso did his duty. He insisted that 
everything should be opened, he looked 
through every parcel, however small, but 
he gave no unnecessary trouble and he ex- 
pected no fee. Indeed, Yucatan is one of 
the few countries where ''tips" are not 
generally given. It has not yet been spoiled 
by the tourist. The cars on the railway to 
Merida are like those in the United States, 
but there is no upholstery, as this would 
be inconvenient in the climate of Yucatan. 
The land is very flat. We passed through 
a forest of stunted trees and bushes until 
we reached the haciendas, where hene- 
quin was planted in long rows like Indian 
corn. On these farms there are ingenios, 
or factories for reducing the plant into hemp 
for exportation. Around each farmhouse 
is a grove of palm and laurel. 

After an hour or more we reached Me- 
rida. We secured quarters at the Hotel 
Independencia, taking our meals at the 
Lonja Club, two squares away. My room 
opened upon a little balcony overlooking 



148 Protean Papers 

the plaza. The ceiling of this room was 
nearly twenty feet high, the floor was of 
brick tile, the bed was a cot with no mat- 
tress, and above it was set a scaffold for 
the mosquito net. The hotel was a stone 
building, one hundred and ten years old, 
with quite original sculptures over the 
doors and windows. The outside was 
covered with stucco and decorated in imi- 
tation of stone, much like our own fashion 
of painting our woodwork, and then grain- 
ing it so as to resemble the wood which has 
just been covered up. The plaza was very 
beautiful in the bright moonlight. There 
were white walks and green trees, over 
the tops of which appeared on the left the 
massy gray walls of the Cathedral of Me- 
rida, a huge building of the conventional 
Spanish type, and on the right the graceful 
tower of the Ayuntamiento, or City Hall, 
and the Corinthian portico of a new busi- 
ness building — all looking very fresh and 
clean. 

In the winter season Merida is a pleasant 
city. It is an inland Havana on a small 
scale, with many of the evil odors and 
much of the dirt eliminated. It has its 
tramways and its electric lights, but still it 



A Visit to Yucatan 149 

bears the appearance of antiquity. When 
we arrived, the air was fresh and next morn- 
ing it was too cool to be comfortable, but 
this was exceptional weather, even for Feb- 
ruary. During a few hours in the middle 
of the day the sun's rays poured down with 
great vigor and we sought speedy shelter 
from them. A visit to the market the next 
morning revealed the fact that this day had 
been a St. Bartholomew for the dogs of 
Merida. They were lying dead in heaps 
and rows, destroyed by the poisonous wiles 
of the butchers whose meat they had con- 
sumed without proper payment. This and 
the weekly cock fight (a prominent feature 
among the amusements of the city), as well 
as the brutal treatment of the poor little 
horses that drag the cabs through the streets, 
reveal the worst side of the Spanish- Ameri- 
can character — its insensibility to the feelings 
of dumb beasts. 

The Lonja Club occupies one of the finest 
buildings in the city, a large, one-story edi- 
fice covering much ground, with a court- 
yard in the middle, galleries around, and on 
the outside of these the rooms of the club, 
restaurant, library, etc. In the courtyard a 
temporary stage had been constructed, for 



ISO Protean Papers 

the club was to give a dramatic perform- 
ance the evening after our arrival in the city. 
By the kindness of one of the members v^e 
v^ere invited and the spectacle was a fine 
one. All the beauty and fashion of Merida 
were seated in the open court and in the por- 
ticos around it, under a brilliant moon, and 
the best amateurs of the city were playing 
a little farce, followed by a '{ar^uela, a con- 
ventional, light musical comedy, written 
in rhyme, common in all Spanish countries. 
But we did not stay long. A greater at- 
traction drew us away — a Mestizo ball in 
another part of the city. We hurried 
thither and found, in a large building, some 
two or three hundred Mestizos, all clad 
in spotless white, dancing their national 
dances, as well as the quadrilles and 
waltzes which are now the common pos- 
session of civilized humanity. 

The dress of the men and women was 
much the same as that which they wore 
upon the street, but it was elegantly deco- 
rated. The men wore the same sandals, 
each composed of a leather sole fastened 
by thongs to the bare foot ; the same white 
trousers or drawers, with the white shirt 
over them; but the shirt was elaborately 



A Visit to Yucatan 151 

embroidered and sometimes fastened with 
a set of diamond studs. The women had 
slippers on their otherwise bare feet. Their 
stiffly starched white skirts were embroid- 
ered very delicately with small figures in 
bright colors at the bottom, and a sort of 
tunic, cut low at the neck and falling over 
the skirt as far as the knees, was embroid- 
ered in the same way near the edges, both 
at the top and bottom. This is so elabo- 
rately done that it is often the work of 
months and years. The Mestizo women 
are fond of jewelry, and are often bedecked 
with heavy gold chains, necklaces, and 
other ornaments. Their stiff black hair is 
combed back and done up in a little roll be- 
hind the head. Their faces are not pretty, 
but have a very amiable expression. The 
conduct of both men and women at the 
ball was perfectly decorous, and those who 
had charge of the entertainment were most 
hospitable. 

These Mestizos, a mixed race descended 
from the Maya Indians and their Spanish 
conquerors, form the artisan class in Merida. 
They do not seem to have inherited the 
bloodthirsty characteristics attributed to 
either of the races from which they have 



152 Protean Papers 

come; they are a docile, sweet-tempered 
people, quite intelligent, and as industrious 
as can be expected in this tropical climate. 
They will do you a favor when they can, 
and they are fairly honest — that is, they 
will ''borrow'' your cake of soap but will 
leave your $50 bill untouched. So, at least, 
they were described to us, and so we 
found them, except that, although we left 
our rooms open and our baggage un- 
packed, we never missed the cake of soap. 
They speak both Spanish and their own 
Maya tongue, a language described by the 
Spaniards as ''quite like English" — that 
is, it sounds a little like it to those who 
cannot understand the words, as it has 
many consonants and many monosyllables, 
and the grammar shows a similar lack of 
inflections. There is certainly no other 
likeness. 

The next afternoon we took the train for 
Ticul, one of the larger villages of Yucatan, 
about fifty miles from the capital. This is 
the starting-point for the ruins of Uxmal. 
We were nearly four hours on the way. 
A pair of brisk trotters on a good road 
would have done it in the same time, but 
there are neither brisk trotters nor good 



A Visit to Yucatan 153 

roads in Yucatan. Many of the villages 
we passed were very picturesque. The 
cabins were oval in shape and had steep, 
high roofs thatched with long grass. The 
sides were constructed of small poles placed 
close together, sometimes plastered over 
and sometimes not. Each cabin had but 
one room, where all the family lived, and 
we could see the groups before the doors 
arrayed in costumes of more than Arcadian 
simplicity. A woman in a loose gown 
with a water jug on her shoulder, standing 
at a well, might have served as a model 
for *'Rebekah" or ''The Woman of Sa- 
maria.'' 

The fonda, or tavern, at Ticul was very 
primitive. Two or three bedrooms, des- 
titute of furniture, except a chair or two, 
a kitchen in the middle of the house 
where a few sticks burned upon the bare 
ground, and a room in front, with a rough 
table for dining, — this was all. We must 
provide our own beds. The first question 
when we asked for accommodation was, 
'' Have you any hammocks } " Luckily we 
had brought them with us. So we were 
conducted to the only vacant room, totally 
bare, opening upon the yard at the back of 



154 Protean Papers 

the house and permeated with evil smells. 
There were no windows. There were four 
rings upon the wall for hammocks. My 
companions came back with this informa- 
tion to the dining-room, where I was talk- 
ing with the landlady. There was only 
room, they said, for two hammocks; what 
was to be done ? But we were unsophisti- 
cated. She laughed as she showed us how 
all three could be hung upon these four 
rings in the shape of the letter N. If there 
had been six of us instead of three, she 
would have shown us how to hang them, 
some low and others high, so as to accom- 
modate all. Four rings will go a long way 
toward providing sleeping quarters in Yu- 
catan. 

We ordered chickens and eggs and bread 
and oranges to take with us to Uxmal, for 
at that place there are no accommodations. 
Probably we would have to sleep in the 
ruins. Perhaps the mayoral, or super- 
intendent of the hacienda near-by, might 
ask us to stay all night with him, but this 
was uncertain; for we bore no letters, and, 
at all events, we must bring our own food 
with us. The landlady of the inn was to 
waken us at four in the morning for the 



A Visit to Yucatan 155 

start, but we had learned from other travel- 
lers that we ourselves would have to arouse 
the household. Indeed, this was not diffi- 
cult, for there was no temptation to sleep. 
Our overcoats made bad pillows, the odors 
were intolerable, the fleas were vicious, 
and after the first hour or two of broken 
slumber I could hear the village clock strike 
one, two, three, and four; and at the last 
hour I very willingly aroused everybody 
and insisted upon the immediate prepara- 
tion of the morning chocolate. The owner 
of the volan, or carriage, which was to take 
us to the ruins, was already busy hitch- 
ing his mules, and a little after five, in the 
bright moonlight, we set out for Uxmal. 

The road from Ticul to Uxmal is simply 
execrable. 1 measured some of the rocks 
over which the volan jolted, and they were 
thirty inches high. The two wheels of 
our vehicle were enormous, eight feet in 
diameter at least. The small conveyance 
that was swung between them looked 
like a low-roofed omnibus, but it had no 
floor. Ropes were stretched across the 
bottom in checkerboard fashion and upon 
these a sort of mattress was spread. There 
were no seats. If there were only two 



156 Protean Papers 

persons they could lie lengthwise upon the 
mattress and be reasonably comfortable. If 
there were t;hree or more, the passengers 
had to sit sandwiched, side by side. There 
were three of us, and we found it most 
convenient for each man to stick his feet 
out between the posts supporting the roof 
on the side opposite the one where he sat. 
We were pitched backward and forward 
like shuttlecocks as the vehicle jolted over 
the rocks. There were three mules hitched 
to this conveyance, miserable-looking little 
beasts with the hair rubbed off their skins, 
and in some places the skin itself rubbed 
off by the rope traces. Yet they trotted 
along at a lively pace, especially where the 
road was particularly rough. 

On the way to Uxmal we passed two 
haciendas with large fields of henequin 
and groups of laborers* cabins around the 
large stone factory. Then we crossed the 
cerro, a ridge of low rocky hills which 
forms the backbone of Yucatan, and beyond 
this the rest of the twenty-four miles to 
Uxmal was wilderness. Climbing the hill 
was slow work, but on the way down the 
little Indian who drove the mules rushed 
over the rocks at headlong speed. Branches 



A Visit to Yucatan 157 

projected from the small trees and bushes 
at each side, and we had to look out for 
them as we passed. The Indian boy, who 
sat on a board in front and drove the mules, 
had to do the same. Indeed, it was he 
who got the first smart cut over the eye. 

It was nearly midday when we came to 
the hacienda of Uxmal. The superintendent 
told us that we were welcome to swing 
our hammocks in one of his rooms for the 
night, provided us with a table in another 
apartment for our meals, and gave us an 
Indian guide who accompanied us to the 
ruins, a mile and a half away. The walk 
was intensely hot and uncomfortable. The 
tropical sun beat upon us violently, and 
the small trees and bushes on each side of 
the pathway afforded no protection. 

Our Indian guide could tell us little about 
the ruins further than to show us the way, 
but the admirable work written by Mr. 
Stephens nearly fifty years ago gave us all 
the information which we needed. There 
was never a book of travels more entertain- 
ing and accurate at the same time than 
that of Mr. Stephens. His measurements 
and descriptions are exact, and when we 
compared the ruins themselves with the 



158 Protean Papers 

illustrations of his work made by Mr. 
Catherwood, we found them as nearly per- 
fect as possible, considering the additional 
decay of the last fifty years. The great 
bulk of the city of Uxmal is now destroyed, 
but the palaces and temples which formed 
the Kremlin of this Moscow of the Maya 
people still remain in a remarkable state of 
preservation. There are remnants of the 
old walls still discernible, and the stately 
buildings which they inclose are preserved 
almost intact. 

We first entered the Casa de las Monjas, 
or Nuns' House, a collection of four long 
beautiful buildings surrounding an open 
square. Each of these buildings is discon- 
nected from the others, but they are close 
together. We entered the square court- 
yard through a ''triangular arch," as it is 
called, where the stone walls upon each side 
come closer and closer together up to the 
apex, which is surmounted by a flat stone. 
Except for this stone it is somewhat like 
the perpendicular Gothic arch. There are 
a number of these triangular arches at 
Uxmal. In some of them the sides are 
straight, in others they curve inward — like 
the genuine Gothic arch — until they reach 



A Visit to Yucatan 159 

this flat stone at the top. The Maya peo- 
ple were evidently attempting to do some- 
thing which was finally accomplished in 
the Eastern hemisphere by mediaeval archi- 
tecture. 

As we entered the great court of the 
Nuns' House, we saw that the long build- 
ing on the south side through which we 
had just passed was lower than the others. 
The loftiest structure was on the north in 
front of us. A broad stairway (now in 
ruins) led up to it, flanked on each side 
by heavy stonework. The noble building 
which faced us at the top of this stairway 
had five front entrances. The walls were 
plain up to the cornice, but the cornice 
itself was larger than the building below it, 
and was ornamented by elaborate sculp- 
tures. The work was all done upon small 
blocks of stone. Over each doorway there 
were grotesque heads, superimposed one 
above another, and over three of the doors, 
the one at the centre and those at each end, 
these ornaments extended upward in tri- 
angular shape. The remaining part of the 
cornice was composed of geometrical fig- 
ures, some of them quite similar to the 
*' Wall of Troy." 



i6o Protean Papers 

On the east side of the courtyard was the 
most beautiful of all the buildings of Uxmal, 
and it remains to-day in a remarkable state 
of preservation. Here also there are five 
doorways, and above the central door are 
the same grotesque figures. The rest of 
the cornice is composed of stone lattice- 
work, and above each of the other door- 
ways is an ornament of remarkable beauty, 
consisting of eight horizontal bars, shorter 
at the bottom, longer at the top, with a 
dragon's head at the end of each bar, and 
a head with a head-dress remarkably like 
those in ancient Egyptian sculptures, 
placed across the middle of the three upper 
bars. 

The facade of this east building seems to 
be as perfect a specimen of its own peculiar 
kind of architecture, as exquisite in design, 
and as well proportioned as the courts of 
the Alhambra or the facade of the Palace of 
the Doges. I do not intend to be an en- 
thusiast as to these ruins. For practical 
application to the uses of modern life they 
would be found defective. In some of the 
buildings the ornaments are grotesque and 
unsatisfactory. None of these structures is 
large enough to be impressive by reason of 



A Visit to Yucatan i6i 

its mere size, nor airy and delicate enough 
to attract us by reason of its mere airiness 
and delicacy, but I affirm in respect to the 
structure which stands at the east side of 
the courtyard of the Nuns' House at Uxmal, 
that if the requirements of modern life, 
whether for zoological garden, picture gal- 
lery, or other purpose, should call for a 
building of this particular kind — long, low, 
and with many entrances in front, — no 
modern architect could without plagiarism 
produce its superior so far as relates to the 
proportions and general decoration of the 
facade. Its unknown designer was one of 
the world's great architects. Remnants of 
red paint were to be seen in the holes of the 
lattice-work. The fagade of this building 
(like the walls of the courts in the Alham- 
bra) was probably painted in brilliant colors 
in past times. 

The edifice on the west of the courtyard 
was mostly in ruins, although the sculp- 
tures on the part which remained showed 
that it had been even more elaborate. The 
broad cornice was divided into panels, and 
the forms of serpents twined together sur- 
rounded each panel. The mouth of one of 

these serpents had a human face in its jaws, 
II 



1 62 Protean Papers 

and there was a long rattle on the tail of the 
other. 

On the southern building there was also 
diamond lattice-work, and over each door 
was a window with an ornament which 
seemed to represent a small house with a 
thatched roof, and above the roof the gro- 
tesque face of some god or monster. 

After leaving the Nuns' House, we visited 
the Casa de las Palomas, the pigeon- 
house, so called from the gables perforated 
by windows, which look like the front of 
pigeon-houses. These are, however, not 
the fronts of houses at all. They form the 
backbone or comb of the series of buildings 
below, and were built solely for the pur- 
pose of ornament. They remind one much 
of a series of gabled houses in a Dutch town. 

Behind the Casa de las Palomas is another 
courtyard, and beyond this a teocallis, a 
high truncated pyramid, where the sacri- 
fices of human victims to the old Maya 
gods were performed with great pomp and 
ceremony. Near this is the Casa de la 
Vieja, the ''old woman's house," a pyra- 
mid nearly as high, surmounted by a small 
stone building, upon which the stone figure 
of an old woman was prominent. 



A Visit to Yucatan 163 

The next building we visited was the 
Casa del Gobernador, supposed to be the 
king's palace. It was more than four hun- 
dred feet long and was placed upon the top 
of three terraces, aggregating some seventy 
feet in height. The cornice of this build- 
ing above the doorways was loaded down 
with grotesque sculptures, and there were 
several triangular arches in the facade. 
Here Stephens found upon the walls some 
fifty years ago the print of small red hands, 
not painted, but an exact impression of 
human hands. One or two specimens of 
these are still remaining. Our guide in- 
sisted that this was done in blood, but 
evidently that could not be the case, since 
such an impression would hardly outlast 
the centuries since Uxmal was abandoned. 

Another edifice of great interest, although 
smaller in dimensions, is the Diviner's 
House, perched on the top of a lofty pyra- 
mid, and reached only by a steep and rather 
dangerous stone stairway. This is said to 
have been the dwelling of the high-priest, 
although little is known, even by the de- 
scendants of the people who built these 
structures, of the purpose for which they 
were constructed. 



1 64 Protean Papers 

During our examination of these build- 
ings the heat was stifling, and the gar- 
rapatas (minute insects, so small that a 
single one can hardly be seen) would come 
in such numbers over our white trousers as 
to require constant switching with a green 
bush to keep them off. Our Maya guide, 
with his bare legs, had a harder time of it 
than we. These little creatures are a great 
pest. They will burrow into the flesh and 
cause much trouble if not removed. One 
of my companions wrote to me three 
months afterward from Chicago that the 
garrapatas were still with him. I was 
more diligent with my brush and had bet- 
ter fortune. Our guide removed them from 
his legs with a piece of wax which he had 
brought for the purpose, and when any of 
them got upon our hands the wax was 
equally convenient for us. We saw thou- 
sands of these little creatures upon a single 
twig or leaf. 

After visiting the ruins of Uxmal we re- 
mained one night at the hacienda. It was 
dangerous to stay in this neighborhood too 
long. At the time when Uxmal was a 
great city, the people, in order to provide 
water for the dry season, had constructed 



A Visit to Yucatan 165 

vast aguadas, or reservoirs with immense 
cisterns. After the land became a wilder- 
ness, these reservoirs came to be the breed- 
ing houses of pestilence, and the climate of 
Uxmal at the present time is deadly to the 
stranger. Indeed, the hacienda in the neigh- 
borhood has been repeopled several times, 
the original occupants having perished from 
the fever. We inquired of the mayoral 
whether it was healthy at the present time. 
He answered that the season was a very 
healthy one; there were thirty people then 
in the hacienda, and only six of them were 
down with the fever! We kept the doors 
of our rooms tightly closed during the night. 
On our return to Ticul the following 
morning an accident happened. We en- 
countered a heavily laden wagon drawn by 
six mules. The road was too narrow for 
us to pass. There was a collision, and the 
axle of our volan was so badly cracked that 
the vehicle threatened to go to pieces at 
any moment, so we thought it best to ride 
no farther. The nearest hacienda was six 
miles away. If we could walk that far per- 
haps we could find another conveyance to 
Ticul — ''who knows .^" We started on 
foot and the Indian boy kept his place in 



1 66 Protean Papers 

the volan till it should break down. We 
had greater powers of endurance than we 
thought. The terrible sun hid his rays be- 
hind light clouds most of the time, the volan 
climbed and descended the ridge in safety, 
and we all reached the hacienda of San Jose 
in fair condition. But there was no other 
vehicle to be had. We must go on ten 
miles farther to Ticul. 

When we had gone a little more than 
half that distance, three other vehicles like 
our own passed us upon the road. One of 
these stopped and a voice from the inside 
asked us in broken English if we had had an 
accident. We explained what had hap- 
pened, and our unknown friend insisted 
that we should take his volan. He and his 
companions would get out and wait, and 
the driver would return for them. This 
was certainly a hospitable act to strangers. 
We thanked him, but declined. 

The road was monotonous, but not de- 
void of interest. Upon the ridge of the low 
hill on the right we could see great cacti 
growing higher than the trees, and as we 
approached the village the henequin fields 
began again, and then the palms and the 
verdure and white-plastered cabins. 



A Visit to Yucatan 167 

We were hungry as wolves when we 
reached the fonda, but luckily a gourd which 
we had filled at Uxmal had furnished us 
with water on the way, besides a little to 
spare once in a while for our hot axle. Our 
hostess at the tavern gave us a wretched 
meal, which, however, tasted as if it had 
come from paradise; and after an evening's 
stroll through the town we swung our 
hammocks upon the rings in the walls of 
our bare room and tried to sleep. We began 
to now understand the manifold reasons 
suggested by the fan merchant in Havana 
why this was impossible. I was glad enough 
after once more counting the hours to hear 
the clock strike five, when I was to awaken 
the household. They gave us our morning 
chocolate and we started for the train to 
Merida. 

The scene at the station was curious. 
Some wild steers had to be driven into one 
of the cars. They had been lassoed, but it 
was no easy work to bring them to the 
platform and put them on board. They 
plunged and rushed in every direction, and 
great shouts went up from the crowd as 
one after another of the men in charge had 
to dodge and run. It was almost as fine 



1 68 Protean Papers 

sport as a bull fight. When we reached 
Merida a bath was the first necessity, and 
then a ''square meal," the first for three 
days. 

On the following morning we betook 
ourselves to Progreso to take the steamer 
for Vera Cruz, but a ''Norte " was blowing, 
and although the Ytimuri was lying in 
the roadstead there was no communication 
with the shore, so we returned to Merida 
by the afternoon train. The hotel at Pro- 
greso was insufferable. Pigeons and other 
birds perched upon the rafters of the room 
where we breakfasted, and the bad odors 
of the place, moral as well as material, drove 
us away. Next morning we came back 
again, and after some hours of waiting on 
the long pier the tug brought us out to the 
steamer, which had to remain there still 
another day to unload a cargo which the 
lighters would not take until the "Norther" 
had subsided. There was a company of 
jovial passengers on board, among them an 
Irish priest, who insisted that the Greek 
language boasted of an ablative, and who 
gave us much startling information on 
other matters from a characteristically Celtic 
point of view. After we started, another 



A Visit to Yucatan 169 

''Norther'' came, and as a contortionist 
the Yumuri was not to be outdone. She 
rolled magnificently. Sometimes the ladies 
were hurled from one side of the cabin to 
the other, then they would tumble to the 
floor together and slide from side to side 
amid shrieks of laughter, while others em- 
braced the posts and handrails with desper- 
ate tenacity. Next morning, however, the 
storm subsided and we entered the port of 
Vera Cruz. 




■mfr- .,<i»».:*iij->--^airnn?^y'7TjMj-r'^ ^^ .. 



ON WILLIAM PENN AND HIS MISSION 

WHAT part did William Penn and those 
who settled Pennsylvania play in 
the world's history? We are far enough 
away from the scene of these events to 
judge with some impartiality, yet opinions 
are still widely divergent. On the one 
hand, he is considered an apostle of light, 
the forerunner of a new civilization ; on the 
other, he is described by Macaulay as a 
courtier and a sycophant, a supporter of the 
tyranny of James II., and a participant in 
several questionable transactions. 

The colony he established in Pennsylvania 
has been regarded as the first example of a 
new society in which the brotherhood of 
man was established upon principles of 
justice and fair dealing, and on the other 
hand this colony has been described by 
Parkman as a community in which patriot- 
ism was frittered away in internal dissen- 

170 



William Penn 171 

sions, and in which the duty to give loyal 
support to the neighboring colonies in their 
life-and-death struggle with the French and 
Indians was neglected at the dictates of 
unworthy selfishness and maudlin philan- 
thropy. The truth lies somewhere between 
these extravagant estimates. 

No one ought to doubt the sincerity and 
the pure purposes of William Penn. He 
proved them by a life of sacrifice and self- 
denial. The son of an eminent admiral, 
he cast aside the allurements of station, 
and was content, for the sake of his faith, 
to take his lot among the followers of an 
humble and persecuted sect. For this he 
was driven from his father's house, was 
exposed to general obloquy, and repeatedly 
suffered imprisonment, 
y. William Penn and the Commonwealth 
which he established were a fair type of 
Quakerism — of its self-renunciation, hon- 
esty, fair dealing, religious tolerance, and 
love of peace, but also of the essential 
weakness of its principle of non-resist- 
ance. It has been a Commonwealth, in- 
dustrious, prosperous, liberal in institutions 
yet conservative in sentiment, adapted to 
every exigency except war, and to the 



172 Protean Papers 

development of all virtues except those 
stern and rugged qualities which strife 
engenders. 

Although the doctrines of Quakerism 
mark a step in the world's progress, they 
are not the embodiment of final truth. 
Like other sects, Quakerism represents a 
phase in the progressive development of 
the religious thought of civilization. It is 
not the last word which civilization has to 
utter. Nor were the early Friends, how- 
ever great their devotion to what they 
considered the ''Inner Light,'' entirely con- 
sistent either in belief or practice. They 
rejected titles, they would not offer words 
of compliment, and William Penn braved 
the contempt of the world and endured 
exile from his father's house because he 
would not take off his hat to his father nor 
his king. And yet the man who refused 
this act of reverence wrote, in 1764, to 
the Duke of York a letter regarding the 
boundaries of Pennsylvania, which began 
as follows: 

** Great Prince: — It is some security to me, and a 
happiness I must own and honor, that in these my 
humble and plain addresses I have to do with a prince 
of so great justice and resolution; one that will not be 



William Penn 173 

baffled by crafts nor blinded by affection; and such a 
prince, with humility be it spoken, becometh the just 
cause I have to lay before him." 

These words were addressed to James 

II., and it must be confessed that there is 

something of the instinct of the courtier 

cropping out through the plain language of 

\the Quaker. 

William Penn and the Society he repre- 
sented were tolerant of the religious beliefs 
of others, yet this toleration had its limits, for, 
according to the ''Frame of Government'' 
which he established for Pennsylvania, 
members of the Council and Assembly and 
all judges were to be such only as professed 
faith in Jesus Christ. The Jew could hold 
no office. It was further provided that all 
persons who confessed one Almighty God 
to be the Creator, Upholder, and Ruler of 
the world, and held themselves pledged to 
live peaceably and justly in civil society, 
should in no wise be molested on account 
of their persuasion or practice in matters 
of faith. This would exclude the Brahmin, 
the Buddhist, the agnostic. The limits of 
toleration were wide, but the walls were 
there. 

William Penn was willing to grant equal 



174 Protean Papers 

rights to all his Anglo-Saxon colonists, but 
William Penn held negro slaves. 
> The colony of Pennsylvania represented 
' the temperance and sobriety of a God-fear- 
ing sect, yet we hear of the sale of liquor 
to the Indians, until the scandal led to a 
law providing that no rum should be ''sold 
to any but the chiefs, and in such quanti- 
ties as the Governor and Council should 
think fit." 

These inconsistencies are by no means 
evidences of insincerity, but they are sim- 
ply evidences that the standard set by 
Friends was such that it could not be con- 
sistently carried out, even by those of the 
best intentions. 

This is still more evident when we come 
to the doctrine of non-resistance. Govern- 
ment itself means force. If force were 
never necessary, government would be 
unnecessary. All social functions could be 
performed by voluntary co-operation. But 
there are delinquents who will not do their 
part. There are criminals who break the 
rules necessary to social peace, who com- 
mit murder, robbery, and other acts of 
violence and fraud. These things must be 
repressed, without force if possible, but 



William Penn 175 

with force if necessary. Hence the law, 
the judge, the jailor, the sheriffs posse, 
and the army. If force may be necessary, 
the utmost force is sometimes indispensa- 
ble, even to the taking of life. This force, 
in the last analysis, means war. Hence, 
that the doctrine of non-resistance should 
be applied at all times, under all circum- 
stances, by the head of the civil govern- 
ment, is not practicable. William Penn 
himself seemed to acknowledge this em- 
barrassment, for in the year 1700, when a 
riot occurred in East Jersey, he wrote a 
letter to his friends in that government to 
\show the course he would pursue. In this 
letter he said 

* he knew not what punishment these rioters did not 
deserve, and he would rather live alone than not have 
such people corrigible. Their leaders should be eyed 
and some should be forced to declare them by the 
rigor of the law, and those who were found to be such 
should bear the burthen of sedition, which would be 
the best way to behead the body without danger. If 
lenitives would not do, coercives should be tried; but 
though men naturally begin with the former, yet wis- 
dom had often sanctioned the latter as remedies, which, 
however, were never to be adopted without regret.' 

But to put down a riot by force and to put 
down a great rebellion by arms differ only 



176 Protean Papers 

in degree. Moreover, Penn in accepting 
his charter from the king accepted in it the 
powers of a captain-general to levy, mus- 
ter, and train man to make war upon 
barbarous natives, pirates, and robbers. 

In 1 701 the king required a contribution 
of 350 pounds sterling toward erecting 
forts on the frontiers of New York, and 
William Penn convened the Assembly to 
lay before them the king's letter. He 
recommended it to their serious considera- 
tion, but abstained from expressing any 
views in regard to it. In answer, they 
declined to comply, and postponed the 
matter to the next Assembly. Penn ap- 
parently desired the contribution to be 
made, for at the next Assembly he wrote 
again recommending it to their serious 
thought and care. 

But, however impossible the maintenance 
of peace may be under extreme conditions, 
the government established by William 
Penn shows how admirably fair dealing 
will accomplish it under ordinary circum- 
stances. To me the most beneficent feat- 
ure of his government is the inculcation 
of the spirit of fairness. Within a month 
from the date of the charter granted to 



William Penn 177 

Penn, he thus wrote to the inhabitants of 
Pennsylvania: *' You shall be governed by 
laws of your own making and left a free, 
and, if you will, a sober and industrious 
people. I shall not usurp the right of any 
or oppress his person/' And again, on 
April 12, 1 66 1, to friends in England: 
**For the matters of liberty and privilege I 
propose that which is extraordinary, and 
to leave myself and successors no power 
of doing mischief, that the will of one 
man may not hinder the good of the whole 
country/' In the history of Pennsylvania, 
there never appeared upon the part of 
Penn any desire to maintain his own pre- 
rogative or to usurp any powers or privi- 
leges against the wish of the people, but, 
on the other hand, always a willingness to 
make additional concessions and to regulate 
the affairs of the colony in the manner the 
people desired. He relinquished duties and 
taxes that had been allowed him, and 
carried his generosity to such an extent as 
seriously to cripple his fortune. 

He also insisted upon fair treatment from 
others for those whom he represented. 
This is shown in a Remonstrance to the 
Duke of York by the Trustees of West 



178 Protean Papers 

Jersey, probably written by Penn, against 
the exaction of a duty on imports and ex- 
ports. This remonstrance shows that the 
powers of government were granted to the 
Trustees, and that the power of taxation 
claimed by the Duke's agents was a viola- 
tion of English liberty. He foreshadows the 
future doctrine of the colonies, ''that taxa- 
tion without representation was tyranny,'' 
in these words: ''Since we are by this 
precedent assessed without any law and 
thereby excluded our English right of con- 
senting to taxes, what security have we of 
anything which we possess.^'' The re- 
monstrance was effectual and the duty was 
remitted. 

Nowhere did Penn's fairness appear more 
manifest than in his treatment of the na- 
tives. He not only bought their land for a 
fair price, but established careful regulations 
for dealing with them. Goods sold or ex- 
changed with them were to be exhibited in 
open market, that imposition might be pre- 
vented. No colonist was allowed to affront 
or wrong an Indian without incurring the 
same penalty as if the offence were com- 
mitted against his fellow planter. Differ- 
ences between the Indians and colonists 



William Penn 179 

were to be settled by a jury of twelve men, 
six of whom were to be Indians. 
In a letter to Robert Turner he says : 

*M did refuse a great temptation last Second-day, 
which was 6,000 pounds to pay the Indians for six 
shares and make the purchasers a company to have 
wholly to itself the Indian trade from North to South 
between the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers, paying 
.2 1/2 per cent acknowledgment or rent. But as the 
Lord gave it me over all and great opposition, and 
that I never had my mind so exercised to the Lord 
about my outward substance, I would not abuse His 
love nor act unworthy of His providence and so defile 
what came to me clean." 

The most conspicuous example of his fair 
dealing was that celebrated treaty with the 
Indians of which Voltaire said that it was 
the only league between those nations and 
the Christians which was never sworn to 
and never broken. The terms of this treaty 
were wholly free from that claim of supe- 
riority which so generally marks the deal- 
ings of white men with Indians. Both the 
contracting parties were put upon a plane of 
absolute equality. All paths were to be free 
to both Christians and Indians. The doors of 
Christian houses were open to the Indians, 
and the houses of the Indians open to the 
Christians. Neither were to believe false 



i8o Protean Papers 

rumors of each other without coming first 
as brethren to inquire. Neither party was 
to harm the other, but, as there were wicked 
people in all nations, if any harm was done 
complaint was to be made, and when sat- 
isfied the injury was to be forgotten. Each 
was to assist the other against all disturb- 
ance, and the children of both were to be 
acquainted with the league, that it might 
be made stronger and stronger, with- 
out rust or spot, between their children 
and children's children, while the creeks and 
rivers run and while the sun, moon, and 
stars should endure. 

Under the provisions of this treaty, the 
colony of Pennsylvania remained free from 
the devastation of Indian warfare until 
after the outbreak of the French and Indian 
War — a period long after the death of 
those who had taken part in the treaty. 
And this war was brought upon the colony 
by the controversion of others, and not by 
the successors of those who had made the 
compact. 

Another evidence of the justice, liber- 
ality, and generosity of the institutions 
established by Penn is found in the fact 
that when he received the grant to Penn- 



William Penn i8i 

sylvania from the king he made no attempt 
to gain any advantage over those who had 
already settled within the territory ceded to 
him. He gave equal rights to the Swedes 
and the Dutch, as well as to Englishmen 
who were already there. And when the 
War of the Revolution broke out, Pennsyl- 
vania was found to be composed of a more 
heterogeneous class of population, differing 
more widely from each other in race, insti- 
tutions, and faith, than any other of the 
thirteen colonies. 

Among the companions of Penn at 
Oxford was the philosopher Locke, who 
drafted a constitution for the Carolinas,* 
which may profitably be compared with the 
government established by Penn. Locke 
created an order of nobility. Penn abol- 
ished the laws of primogeniture. Accord- 
ing to Locke, none but land proprietors 
were eligible to the Legislature. Penn pro- 
vided for annual elections by the whole peo- 
ple. 

**To the charter," says Bancroft, ** which Locke in- 
vented for Carolina, the Palatines voted an immutable 
immortality; and it never gained more than a short 
and partial existence. To the people of his province 
Penn left it free to subvert or alter the ' Frame of Govern- 
ment,' and its essential principles remain to this day." 



1 82 Protean Papers 

It can hardly be denied that much of the 
superiority of Penn's government must be 
accorded to the influence of his religious 
associations, and to his fellowship with a 
sect which acknowledged no distinction of 
clergy and laity and placed a low estimate 
on hereditary rank. His democratic ten- 
dencies appear in the preface to his '* Frame 
of Government/' where he says: 

*' I know what is said by the several admirers of mon- 
archy, aristocracy, and democracy, which are the rule 
of one, of a few, and of many, and are the three com- 
mon ideas of government when men discourse on that 
subject. But I choose to solve the controversy with 
this small distinction, and it belongs to all three. Any 
government is free to the people under it, whatever be 
the frame, where the laws rule and the people are a 
party to these laws. And more than this is tyranny, 
oligarchy, or confusion. But lastly, when all is said, 
there is hardly one frame of government in the world so 
illy designed by its first founders that in good hands 
would not be well enough. History tells us that the best 
in ill ones can do nothing that is great and good; witness 
the Jewish and Roman States. Governments like clocks 
go from the motion men give them, and as governments 
are made to move by men, so by them are they ruined 
too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men 
than men upon governments. Let men be good and 
the government cannot be bad. If it be ill, they will 
cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be ever so 
good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn.*' 



William Penn 183 

The institutions established by Penn were 
certainly more crude than those prevailing 
to-day. They did not distinguish so clearly 
between legislative, administrative, and 
judicial functions. The freemen were to 
choose seventy-two members of the Pro- 
vincial Council, over which the Governor or 
his deputy was to preside and have a treble 
vote. All bills were to be prepared by the 
governor and council and published thirty 
days before the meeting of the Assembly. 
The governor and council managed the 
treasury, saw to the execution of the laws, 
and acted as a court of appeals. The 
general assembly was composed of two 
hundred persons, chosen annually. The 
powers of this assembly were quite limited. 
It could propose no law, but at the end 
of the eight days of deliberation it voted 
yea or nay upon all the laws proposed 
by the council. This was practically little 
more than a veto. In later times we have 
reversed this order. The Legislature passes 
the law and the Executive has a limited 
veto power. 

The qualifications for suffrage were ex- 
tremely liberal for that age. Not only all 
land-holders, but every inhabitant who 



1 84 Protean Papers 

paid '*scot and lot'' to the government, 
might vote. No taxes were to be collected 
but by law. In court all persons might 
appear in their own way, and plead their 
own case. All trials were to be by jury. 
No oaths were to be required. All fines 
were to be moderate; all prisons to be 
work-houses. All marriages were to be 
published and solemnized by the parties 
taking one another as husband and wife 
before witnesses. The estates of felons must 
make satisfaction to the family wronged 
to twice the value, and in default the felons 
were to be bondsmen until the party in- 
jured was satisfied. Slanderers were to 
be punished as enemies of the public peace. 

The sanguinary criminal code of Eng- 
land was abolished, and the penalty of 
death was reserved for wilful murder only. 
But even in this provision it is evident 
that the practical mind of William Penn 
realized that the non-resistant principles 
of Friends could not be fully applied. 

The first inroads made upon Penn's gov- 
ernment found its weak point, as might 
be expected, in the theory of non-resist- 
ance. There were pirates upon the seas, 
and enemies of England and the colonies 



William Penn 185 

both on sea and shore. Every other colony 
erected fortifications and raised troops. 
Pennsylvania alone was undefended. So 
fair had been the conduct of the colonists 
that it was believed no defences would 
be necessary. Yet in a world where the 
doctrine that might makes right is so 
generally acted upon, the time comes 
sooner or later when defences are neces- 
sary. This occurred in Pennsylvania at 
the time of the French and Indian War. 
The French had won most of the native 
tribes to their alliance; the British regulars, 
under Braddock, in their expedition against 
Fort Duquesne, within the limits of Penn- 
sylvania, had encountered a disastrous and 
overwhelming defeat, and the frontiers 
were laid open to the torch and the toma- 
hawk. William Penn had been long in his 
grave. His heirs had not shown a gener- 
ous and disinterested disposition toward 
the colonists. A demand was made by 
the frontiersmen, mainly Scotch-Irish Pres- 
byterians, for protection against the Indians, 
but instead of according this protection 
by a generous contribution of funds and 
by the organization of an efficient militia, 
the inhabitants of the colony seized the 



1 86 Protean Papers 

occasion to contest their rights with the 
proprietors, the heirs of William Penn. 
They were willing to levy a tax, but it 
must be collected on the real estate of 
the colony, and the land of the proprietors 
must be taxed like other land. They re- 
fused any aid except upon this condition. 
The governor did not care to accede to it, 
and the result was that the border settle- 
ments were left exposed to the devasta- 
tion and cruelties of Indian warfare, and 
several thousands of the settlers perished 
by fire and sword. The frontiersmen, in 
their resentment at the outrages of the 
Indians, had themselves committed out- 
rages no less barbarous and unjustifiable, 
and in their rage against the Quaker 
government at Philadelphia they marched 
upon that city. The people, including 
many of the Society of Friends, armed for 
their own defence, and there was seen 
the spectacle, unknown until that time, of 
the broad-brim carrying the musket. An 
actual collision was averted, yet the repu- 
tation of Pennsylvania suffered greatly in 
the contest. 

The colony was also reluctant to take 
part in the War of Independence, and 



William Penn 187 

although the immortal Declaration was 
signed upon the soil of Pennsylvania, yet 
Pennsylvania v^as among the last of the 
colonies w^hich consented to the final step. 

In the Civil War many members of the 
Society of Friends found it impossible to 
reconcile the peace principles of the Society 
v^ith their duty to maintain and uphold the 
Federal Government, and some took up 
arms for the maintenance of the Union. 

All these things show the impossibility 
of carrying out the doctrine of non-resist- 
ance to its logical conclusion. But there 
is another objection to that doctrine more 
vital than the impossibility of applying it 
in extreme cases. It naturally begets the 
willingness and finally the disposition to 
yield, and that disposition inevitably 
weakens the moral fibre of him who pos- 
sesses it. 

It was the struggle for existence which 
led to the survival in organic life of the 
swiftest wing, the sharpest talon, the 
keenest intellect, the most resolute will; 
and the permanent absence of all strife is 
bound to lead to the deterioration of those 
qualities upon which depend the progress 
and advancement of the race. Physical 



1 88 Protean Papers 

resistance indeed is only one form of this 
struggle, but the community which forever 
avoids it will be less likely, in the end, to 
make that moral resistance which is neces- 
sary for the preservation of its integrity. 
Pennsylvania has of late years suffered 
greatly from a political corruption which 
could not have made such serious inroads 
if the really good people of the Common- 
wealth had been more belligerent and more 
stubborn in resistance. But these good 
people, by constant yielding, or perhaps 
by abstaining from participation in political 
controversies at all, have made the work of 
their plunderers easy and successful. 

All honor, then, to the pure motives, the 
spirit of fairness and kind dealing which 
characterized the career of William Penn 
and his associates ; but let us be careful not 
to put too much faith in the peace principles 
inculcated by the religious society of which 
he was so eminent a member. 



AN EXPERT IN SCALPING 



IN 1870 the Indian tribes in Nebraska and 
Kansas were under the charge of the 
Society of Friends, and President Grant had 
appointed as superintendent of the district 
the venerable Samuel M. Janney, an emi- 
nent minister of that Society. There had 
been some trouble with the Winnebagoes. 
A party of young braves had just scalped a 
man west of the reservation, a farmer by 
the name of McMurdy, and on their return 
a number of scalp dances and other festivi- 
ties had been held in honor of the event. 
There were thirteen bands of these Winne- 
bagoes, each with its hereditary chief. A 
number of these chiefs had taken a leading 
part in the festivities, and the agent had 
made up his mind that something ought 
to be done. He adopted the rather daring 
expedient of turning out the chiefs who had 
offended, and appointing others in their 

189 



190 Protean Papers 

places, whom he would recognize in the 
distribution of government rations and 
supplies. Naturally, the men who were 
superseded resented this interference, and 
denied the right of the agent to depose 
them. But he was inflexible, and a council 
of the tribe was called, at which he pro- 
posed to announce the changes. 

General Auger, on learning of the trouble, 
had offered to Mr. Janney to send some 
soldiers to protect the agent in case of an 
uprising. But the superintendent objected, 
since he wanted to manage the Indians 
according to the peace principles of the 
Quakers. He asked my father and me to 
go up to the Winnebago reservation, to 
** strengthen the hands of the agent,'' as he 
called it. 

There were about fifteen hundred Indians 
on the reservation, and hardly a score of 
white men. The chiefs and the warriors 
came to the council fully armed, a thing 
then quite unusual in that tribe, although 
common enough in others. The agent 
made a speech, telling them that he would 
no longer recognize the chiefs who had 
taken part in the scalp dances, or who had 
in other ways encouraged or approved the 



An Expert in Scalping 191 

murder of McMurdy. He read the names 
of the new men whom he had decided to 
appoint, and told them to take the front 
seats which had been occupied by their 
predecessors. 

Then the trouble began. The old chiefs 
got up one after another, and delivered 
violent harangues, amid great applause on 
the part of their followers. The leading 
spirit was Grey Wolf, a smooth-faced, light- 
colored Indian, with rows of beautiful white 
teeth, which when he opened his mouth 
made him look as if he were going to chew 
up somebody. His face grew fairly livid with 
rage. He was insolent and abusive. He 
declared that he had held his place by virtue 
of the laws and customs of his tribe, and 
that the agent had no right to turn him out; 
and he added (a dark-colored Indian named 
Alexander interpreting his harangue): ''I 
will give you a piece of advice. Get on your 
pony and get away from here as quickly 
as you can. It is not good for you to stay." 
At every violent utterance the Indians, who 
were squatted about the lodge, ejaculated 
*'How! How! " with great fire and fervor. 
As soon as Grey Wolf ended, he rushed 
out-of-doors, followed by perhaps a dozen 



192 Protean Papers 

of his warriors. A horse named Butter- 
milk, belonging to the agent, was tied to 
a tree near-by. Grey Wolf untied him, 
slipped off the saddle, jumped on his back, 
and started on a full run through the village, 
yelling the war-whoop, and followed on 
foot by the men who had gone out with 
him. The squaws came out of their tepees 
and began to scream. We could hear the 
uproar inside of the lodge, and there was 
great confusion. It seemed to me that 
something ought to be done to quiet the 
disturbance, so I got up and made a speech. 
Fortunately the Indians who were in the 
lodge stopped to listen, and a few of the 
new chiefs and their friends began to ' ' How ! 
How!'' in their turn. Then one of the 
men who had just been appointed made 
a conciliatory speech, but it was received 
with grunts of disapproval. Finally Big 
Bear, an old Indian with an eye gouged out, 
came up to the small table behind which we 
sat and began a harangue more violent even 
than that of Grey Wolf. He was greeted 
with yells of applause. Suddenly I saw the 
Indians looking through a window on one 
side of the lodge, and then all rose and 
rushed in confusion to the door. A white 



An Expert in Scalping 193 

man was standing outside. I asked him, 
*'What does it mean?'* He answered, 
'* United States soldiers/' A small detach- 
ment had been sent by General Auger from 
Omaha, in spite of Mr. Janney's remon- 
strance. There were not many troops, but 
just enough to overawe the Indians and 
convince them that there were more behind. 
Grey Wolf came back with the pony, and 
there was nothing more heard of but peace 
and good-will. Yet I have always had 
very grave doubts whether, if General 
Auger's men had not come, the principles 
of the Society of Friends would have 
answered in that emergency. 

The following winter five Indians were 
arrested and indicted for the murder of 
McMurdy. Mr. Janney wanted them to 
have a fair trial, so Mr. A. J. Poppleton, one 
of the leading lawyers in Nebraska, was 
employed to defend them. I was then a 
law student, and had just been admitted to 
the bar. Mr. Janney asked me to come out 
and help in the defence. Of course there 
was no fee paid to me, but this was a good 
chance to try my hand. It was my first 
trial, and I was greatly in earnest. 

It was an interesting case. The trial was 



194 Protean Papers 

held in the little town of Tekamah, at that 
time a village of perhaps a dozen log houses. 
These houses were all of one story, except 
the ''hotel " and the country store. Nearly 
everybody connected with the trial had to 
go to the little hotel — judge, jury, wit- 
nesses, sheriff, and the prisoners in their 
chains. Mr. Poppleton and I had the only 
private quarters ; everybody else seemed to 
herd together, except the judge, who stayed 
elsewhere. The court was held in the 
attic of the store. You had to go up by 
a little wooden stairway at the outside. 
There was only one chair in the room, a 
wooden arm-chair covered with the Ameri- 
can flag and occupied by his Honor. The 
tables were made of rough boards. The 
counsel sat upon soap-boxes turned up 
on one end. The jury sat on a board 
against the wall. Everybody else either 
stood up or sat on the floor. The Indians, 
both prisoners and witnesses, squatted 
upon the floor. 

We had a hard time to get a jury. 
Whenever the panel was exhausted, the 
sheriff would look out of one of the win- 
dows. There were two of them, one in 
each gable. He could see a long way 



An Expert in Scalping 195 

across the plains, and perhaps would spy a 
man a mile or so off, walking across his 
fields or gathering fodder. ''Bring that 
man here!" he would say to the bailiff, 
who thereupon tore across the country and 
returned with his captive, who would vainly 
endeavor to get excused from service upon 
a jury that might involve some little danger 
to himself and was likely to take a great 
deal of his time. After two or three days 
the panel was filled and the trial began. 

The evidence was circumstantial. The 
five prisoners were seen the day before the 
murder, west of the reservation, walking in 
the direction of McMurdy's farm, but they 
were several miles away. McMurdy's body 
was found in a field near his plough. His 
head had been cut off and thrown into a 
badger hole, and the entire scalp had been 
removed. Three pieces of scalp were 
found in the tepees of three of the prisoners. 
Each piece was stretched and fastened by 
thongs to a willow withe, and painted red 
on the under side. One of these pieces was 
identified by the mother of McMurdy, by a 
scar, as being part of the scalp of her son. 
The five prisoners had returned together to 
the reservation, each with a white feather 



196 Protean Papers 

in his hair, the end of the feather being 
dipped in blood. Then Grey Wolf was 
called as a witness to show what this meant. 
His testimony was interpreted by Alexan- 
der. It meant, he said, that the men who 
wore that feather had become braves. 

'' How did they become braves ? '' 

" By scalping a man.'' 

*'How do you know.^ Did you ever 
scalp anybody ? " 

'^Yes.'' 

''How many.?" 

''Seven." 

"Who were they.?" 

And Grey Wolf named them all, giving 
the time and the occasion. 

There has been much controversy as to 
the proper scope and value of expert testi- 
mony. We have experts in medicine, in 
law, in the physical sciences, in bookkeep- 
ing, in chirography, and in many other 
things; but I doubt whether the history of 
jurisprudence can offer any other instance 
in which a man was examined and his 
testimony received by the Court as an 
expert in scalping. In giving scientific evi- 
dence upon this peculiar art Grey Wolf 
stands alone. 



An Expert in Scalping 197 

The prisoners were convicted, but the 
jury evidently compromised in their ver- 
dict. They considered, rather illogically, as 
juries do, that there was doubt enough in 
the evidence to prevent the application of 
the death penalty, and they prescribed the 
punishment of imprisonment for life, as 
they had a right to do under the law of 
Nebraska. One or two of the Indians were 
afterwards pardoned, and the others died 
in prison. 




MAYA 



A Story of Yucatan 

By WM. DUDLEY FOULKE 
Author of *« Protean Papers,'* ** Slav or Saxon," etc. 



I2''. Illustrated. $1.25 



A tale of love and adventure in which the scenes 
are laid amid the abodes of that wonderful people 
whose ruined cities are to-day the noblest monu- 
ments of aboriginal art. The period is that of the 
Spanish invasion, and the Maya princess, who is the 
chief feature of the story, will hardly fail to awaken 
in the mind of the reader a warm feeling of sym- 
pathy and admiration. 

The author has been a traveller in Yucatan, 
familiar with the scenes he describes, and the events 
which form the background or setting of his romance 
are narrated with historical accuracy. 

*'Mr. Foulke has combined history with romance in a very- 
successful way, and his story will be read with profit as well as with 
pleasure. The volume has some charming illustrations." — Glasgow 
Herald, 

Q. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York London 



OCT 19 1903 



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